Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)
Page 15
“Look.”
Sheppard’s light impaled an upright machete, the blade sunk deeply into the ground, a dark twin of Excalibur, she thought. “You won’t find any prints on it. Or in the sports car.”
“We’ll check just the same.”
He snapped an evidence bag over the handle and started to pull it out of the ground. “Wait,” Mira said. “Let me. It’s the first thing we’ve gotten that he’s held.”
Sheppard stood aside and swept his arm toward the machete. Mira stepped over to it, hesitated, her breathing already deepening. Give me the rest of it, she thought, then brought her hands to the evidence bag and the wooden handle that it covered.
The bright light glints from the shiny blade as it rises and falls, hacking away at a mass of tangled trees and vegetation. The manual work is oddly satisfying, the evidence of progress immediate. Already, he has chopped the fallen trees in the side yard into manageable pieces that he’ll haul to the curb and pile on top of the other debris.
The screen door bangs open and shut. “Hey, hon, how about a cold beer?”
He straightens, wipes his arm across his forehead, and flips the machete away from him. The blade lands upright in the ground. Then he turns toward the woman now standing on the porch in tight denim shorts and a halter top. As always, he’s struck by her beauty. All that copper hair, the dash of freckles across her cheeks, the glow of her pale skin. He joins her in the porch hammock, a colorful weave that swings gently in the heat, and tips the beer to his mouth. Then he rolls the chilly bottle across his face.
“Hey, if you want to cool off, I can connect the AC to the generator for a while.”
It isn’t air-conditioning that he wants. He wants her. He turns toward her, slides his fingers through her hair. drawing her face toward him, and slips his other hand inside her halter top, cupping her breast, freeing it from the fabric, and she laughs softly.
“Someone going to see us.”
“No one’s around.” He murmurs the words with his mouth against her breast and his other hand now sliding between her legs.
Suddenly, light explodes in his peripheral vision. He breaks away from her, gripping the sides of his head as the agony bites through skin, bones, and starts sucking him dry. And then he is elsewhere, in a car, and his small fingers claw at the glass and his mouth opens wide in a silent scream and…
Mira jerked back from the machete, her horror as extreme as the hard, relentless pounding in her temples. “A redhead.” She kept stumbling back until she tripped over something on the ground and went down. “His girlfriend’s a redhead. I think she lives in a little conch house here in the Keys. She’s a knockout and he’s crazy about her. Sexually crazy about her. I’m not sure about his real feelings aside from the sex.” She massaged her temples, rubbed the back of her neck. “There’s more. The boy in my vision yesterday on the Nicholses’ property?”
“The kid in the car?”
She nodded, knuckled her eyes.
Sheppard dropped into a crouch beside her, the machete forgotten. “What about him?”
Her hands dropped into her lap. “Shep, he grew up to become the man who took Adam.”
PART TWO
Mile Zero
Go on till you come to the end; then stop.
—Lewis Carroll
Chapter 13
Suki & Paul
Suki, stretched out on the bed in Adam’s room, watched the hands of the battery-operated clock click along until it was four minutes past midnight. The hot, stagnant air felt like a tremendous weight against her. She still held the Ambien that she had dropped into her hand twenty minutes ago. She didn’t want to take it, but craved the oblivion that it promised, the dreamless sleep.
The door to the room was shut and locked, to keep Paul out. She didn’t feel like talking to him, seeing him, interacting with him about anything. At a time when they should be drawing comfort from each other, her feelings were a pathetic commentary on their marriage. But there you had it, she thought, the raw truth.
The feds who were monitoring the phones stayed out of her way and, thanks to the mayor’s edict, the media had been gone since dinner. The generator had been turned off for the night, so the only noises that reached her through the open window were night sounds—a distant rumble of thunder and closer in, the chorus of insects and frogs and the hoot of the burrowing owls that lived in the field behind the house. The sounds of the owls comforted her, offering an odd kind of continuity between when she, Adam, and Paul had moved into this house and now.
During the hurricane, she had worried about them, hoping they had left and that they would return. Three days after Danielle had moved on and the saturated ground was starting to dry out, the family of owls had returned to the field and begun building a new home.
The owls had what she needed—resilience.
She lay here, flashlight aimed upward. The light spilled thinly across the ceiling and parts of the walls, and glinted off the wings of the model airplane that hung in the middle of the ceiling once again. Had Paul replaced it? Had she? Suki couldn’t remember.
Several years ago, Adam had dreamed that he was a tiny boy, a Tom Thumb small enough to fit into the cockpit of the plane. He had climbed behind the wheel and taken off, soaring through their apartment in New York, and out the window, out into the darkness and over Central Park. His interpretation? That he felt small and insignificant in the presence of his famous parents. She remembered telling him that she felt small and insignificant in his presence and honored that he had chosen her as his mother.
I chose you? Really? Is that how it works?
She didn’t have an answer then and didn’t have one now. And Adam, she knew, had kept chewing at the central questions ever since: Is everything we experience random? How much is destiny? How much is free will?
Years ago when she was still in her teens, she and her mother had gone to see Ordinary People. The impact of the storyline—the suicide of a troubled teenaged boy and its impact on his family—and the depth that the actors had brought to their roles had devastated her. And it had raised the same issues for her that her remark to Adam had raised for him. For days afterward, she had sifted through the events of her young life, trying to find the hand of destiny in her own experiences. She decided she wouldn’t have children because if she lost a child, she wouldn’t survive it.
Some time ago, her agent had handed her a book called The Lovely Bones. He wanted to know if the story grabbed her enough to play the part of the mother. It began with a dead girl talking about her rape and murder and the impact it had on her family. Every paragraph was so painful, every page so wrenching, that by the end of it she was sucked dry and a kind of superstition seized her. If she played a role in the movie, then the events might happen to her just as they had happened to Christopher Reeve, whose last role before his accident was as a paraplegic in a wheelchair. She had told her agent she wasn’t interested, but ultimately, it hadn’t made any difference. Another version of her worst nightmare had happened anyway.
She pressed his pillow against her cheek and squeezed her eyes shut, fighting back tears, despair, the utter blackness her life would be without Adam. She wished that the room would explode with inexplicable movement, as it had yesterday. At least then, in some weird way, she would feel closer to her son because Adam had talked about the spirit. Friend. But the room remained silent, stifling, hot.
The glass in the window that had shattered during yesterday’s freaky events had been repaired, every piece of furniture returned to its proper place, just like the model airplane. Even the bed had been remade. Paul didn’t make beds, didn’t move furniture, didn’t repair windows. She was too tired to figure it out.
The police believed Adam had been taken in the early morning hours of July 27. She had chosen the arbitrary time of four A.M. as the zero hour. The meant Adam had been missing for slightly more than forty-four hours.
And all can do is lay here, waiting, marking time until—what?
John Gutierrez. “John.” Her voice sounded breathless, ridiculously hopeful. “Any news?”
“We’ve got a couple of leads that’re going to take some research. We could use some help, if you’re willing.”
A lifeline. “Just tell me where.”
“Ross Blake will pick you up. He’s got a curfew pass. We’re working at the Bureau office, which has power. Bring your laptop.”
“What else?”
“Make sure you’re comfortable. It may be a long night. He’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“I’ll meet him at the gate.”
Her first stop was Adam’s bathroom; she dropped the Ambien in the toilet and flushed it away. At least the toilets had never stopped working, she thought. At least the water had continued to flow from the faucets, even if it wasn’t potable. Small things for which she was immensely grateful. She splashed water on her face and hastened out of the room, moving quietly past the door to Paul’s study, where the light shone under the door. She could hear him on the phone. With who now? Her manager? Her agent? A producer? A director?
Paul, wheeling and dealing at midnight, pitching loglines. Son of famous director and Oscar-winning actress is kidnapped. Paul wouldn’t include the rest of it in his pitch, that the director and actress were on the verge of divorce, that the director couldn’t keep his pants zipped, that their lives had unraveled completely.
Suki raced upstairs, through the darkened house, to the master bedroom. Thanks to the generator, the light in here was dim, maybe sixty watts, but sufficient for her purposes. She peeled off her jeans, put on shorts, slid her feet into sandals, ran a brush through her hair. She slipped a few essentials into her handbag, then picked up her flashlight and went into an adjoining room, a small office where the desk was stacked high with scripts, faxes, e-mails, phone messages, much of it accumulating since before the hurricane.
Her career room. The Oscar and a Golden Globe sat on a shelf midway up the wall. To either side of it hung photos of her, Paul, and Adam on various shoots, of her with directors, fellow actors, people whom she loved and admired. Her most prized possession was a framed letter from Nelson Mandela, one of her heroes, thanking her for her help in a charity function. But really, right now, did it mean anything? The instant Adam had disappeared, everything else in her life had screeched to a halt.
She zipped the Macbook Air into its case, scooped the memory stick off the desk and pocketed it. Anything else? Anything she was forgetting?
“Suki?”
Shit. She turned. Paul, silhouetted in the doorway, clasped his hands behind his back and stretched his shoulders, rolled his neck, made it clear through body language that he’d been working so hard—at something—that his shoulders were tight, his neck ached. She was supposed to comment on this, maybe rub his neck, coddle him somehow.
Right.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I just got off the phone with Harvey.”
Like she was supposed to know who the hell Harvey was. “Harvey who?”
“Weinstein.”
That Harvey. “The answer’s no.” She strode right up to him, the laptop case gripped in her right hand, her handbag over her left shoulder. “Excuse me.”
“Wait a minute. Christ, give me a few minutes here, Suki.”
She glared at him. “For what? Your pitch?”
“To tell you what this involves.”
She stood there, a hand on her hip. “Shoot.” You’ve got sixty seconds, Paul.
“We’re going to find him, Suki.”
“Wait. I thought this involved Weinstein.”
“Well, yeah, it does, but—”
“But what, Paul? But, oh, gee, let’s sell our story to Miramax, to Touchstone, to—”
“Jesus, Suki. Calm down. You’re not the only one in pain here.”
“Really? You’re in pain, Paul? And just where do you hurt? Where?”
He looked as though she had kicked him in the balls, his liquid eyes bulging, shadowed, dark.
“Here?” She pressed her palm to his chest. “Does it hurt there, Paul? Huh? Does it?”
He knocked her wrist away from his chest. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”
“And why is that exactly? What’s your excuse this time? Because I have PMS? Because I’m hysterical? Because Adam’s been taken? Explain it to me, Paul. Tell me why you feel compelled to wheel and deal what’s happened to us. I really need to know that.”
He lifted his hands, a barrier. “Hey, all I was trying to say is that Weinstein called. So did Spielberg, Rob Reiner, Ron Howard, Penny Marshall…”
The names rolled off his tongue with a kind of arrogant familiarity. See me? I’m a big shot. Hear me? I know all the greats.
“They called for what exactly?”
“To offer condolences and support…”
“And then you butted in about a possible deal that would involve what’s happened to Adam. Sounds like a goddamn Lifetime movie to me. Yeah, I get the picture, Paul.
. So let me make my position clear. Our son’s disappearance is NOT for sale.”
Their eyes locked.
His body still blocked her exit.
“You disgust me,” she spat, and pushed past him.
But he grabbed her arm, hard, and she swung the laptop case and it struck him in the shoulder.
He stumbled back. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he shouted. “I’m trying to talk to you about—”
“Did you release Mira’s name to the press? Did you release Adam’s photo? Huh? Did you? Is this just a publicity stunt for you, Paul? To kick-start your directing career?”
He looked shocked, shaken, suddenly uncertain.
“I want you out of here,” she hissed, conscious of the feds down the hall. “Go to a hotel. Go to your girlfriend’s house. I don’t give a shit where you go, but I don’t want you here when I get back. We are done, you and me. We are fucking history, Paul.”
She yanked her arm free of his grasp and swept past him.
“Where’re you going?” he shouted after her, almost as if it were an afterthought triggered by the sight of her laptop, her handbag.
“To find Adam.” But she didn’t say it loudly enough for him to hear.
My God, what had she ever seen in him? How had she managed to sleep in the same bed with this man for fifteen years of marriage and—what? A year before that? Two years? What had she needed back then that she’d believed he could provide? Where was the chemistry? Who the hell was she when she’d thought she loved him? How had it come to this travesty?
When she reached the bottom of the driveway, an old station wagon waited there, engine humming, headlights off. The passenger door swung open and she scooted inside.
“Thanks, Mr. Blake. I appreciate this.”
“My pleasure,” he said. “And the name’s Ross.”
“You saved me. I was feeling useless and stupid and debating about whether I should take an Ambien so I could sleep.”
Blake regarded her with an odd expression. “I never figured that you would feel useless and stupid about anything. You seem so… self-sufficient.”
“That’s movies talking.”
He laughed and turned on the headlights. “Not for me. I’ve never seen any of your movies.” He sounded embarrassed. “I guess that’s like admitting, I don’t know, like I’ve never seen E. T or On the Waterfront.” He quickly added, “I’ve seen both of those.”
She couldn’t remember the last time she had met anyone who hadn’t seen at least one of her movies. “You don’t go to movies?”
“I fly,” he replied, as though that explained everything. “And when I’m not flying, I read. And when I’m not reading, I’m running my business. And when I’m not doing that, I guess I’m diving into the other stuff that interests me.”
“Which is?”
“The weird, the strange, the inexplicable. Easter Island. Stonehenge. The Egyptian pyramids. The Mayan ruins. Machu Picchu. The planet itself seems to be filled with mysteries.” He laughed again, put the car in gear, and backed into the road. “I guess I need a couple of lifetimes just to explore everything.”
Her eyes went to his left hand, where the little finger was missing. “What’s the most recent movie you saw?”
“You mean, like a movie separate from TV movies?”
“Yes.”
He thought about it. “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
“My son’s favorite of the Harry Potter books and movies.” She paused. “But I sense hesitancy, Ross?”
He laughed, a quick, quiet laugh. She liked the sound of it. “Complicated,” he said.
“Harry Potter?”
“No, not Potter. Well, yes, Potter, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” He drove slowly along the main road through downtown Tango Key, silent and deserted at this hour, and suddenly lifted his hand from the steering wheel. “I lost this finger in 1968, I was born in 1985. But I’m fifty-three years old.”
Huh? “Granted, I’m no math whiz, but you’ve really lost me now.”
“You need some background information, Suki, so you have some idea of the kind of people you’re dealing with.”
“Which people are we talking about? The good guys or the bad guys?”
“Good guys.”
He then proceeded to tell her how in 1997, when he was twelve years old, he was abducted by a man named Patrick Wheaton and taken through a black water mass that had formed off the coast of Tango Key—and back in time to the 1960s. For the next six years, he’d lived in that time as Wheaton’s adopted son.
Then in the summer of 2003, Mira’s daughter, Annie, was abducted by this same man, taken back to 1968, and Blake—as a teenage boy in that time—had helped her through the “time sickness.” Mira had pursued her daughter, and ended up in 1968 too. Sheppard had figured out that the mass was nature’s wormhole and gone through the black water to find them.