Could she hear him?
Did spirits hear anything?
This is nuts.
He went through the pockets of her Capri pants, found her cell phone, a copy of the letter she’d left for Paul Nichols, and some cash in her back pocket. Had she been carrying a purse? A pack? He stood, shrugged off his raincoat, and spread it over her. Then he called Goot, told him what he’d found.
Sheppard moved around through the trees, his flashlight probing into this shadow, that crevice. He found the pack hundreds of feet from her body, unzipped it. A few items of clothing. More cash. A videotape, neatly labeled Long Hours. An address book. A pocket calendar. Sheppard went through the address book, but there was no entry for Spenser Finch. Hell, she probably didn’t know that he lived on Sugarloaf. The pocket calendar wasn’t helpful either.
He returned to where she lay and while he waited for Goot, Lydia called. “No signal, Shep. His cell’s off. The only calls he’s made—or received—in the last two months have been from Eden Thompkin’s cell. The bill is sent to a P0 box at the Sugarloaf Key post office. I tried contacting the postmaster there, to see if there was a home address, but the guy’s on vacation and his stand-in doesn’t know squat. What do you want me to do?”
Find me a miracle. “I don’t know. Just stand by. Be there, Lydia. Just be there.”
“I’m here, hon, for as long as it takes.”
Sheppard stood in the rain-soaked silence, staring down at Eden’s shrouded body. Should he tighten the pressure on Finch by sending him a text message? Or would additional pressure increase the risk to Adam and Mira? He thought a moment, brought out Eden’s cell phone, and typed: takes more than that to kill me, spense
He pressed send and prayed he’d make the right decision.
Goot appeared in the trees with a couple of paramedics who had a stretcher, and gestured for Sheppard to hurry up, Blake was waiting. They were headed to Sugarloaf.
Chapter 24
Final Destination
Noises pierced her awareness and Mira bolted forward, disgusted that she’d nodded off. Listening, she thought the sounds were coming from downstairs. When Adam had gotten as far as the kitchen much earlier, he’d told her the house was on pilings, so downstairs could be a carport, a porch, a storage area.
She withdrew her arm from Adam’s shoulder, lowered his head to the pillow, slipped off the bed. In the middle of the room, she got down on her hands and knees, pressed her ear to the floor. She strained to hear the sounds.
Movement. It was nothing violent, nothing like pounding or hammering, but something more subtle and ominous. He was moving objects from one place to another. From a closet or storage to—where?
The dock.
A boat at the dock.
But what, exactly, did it mean? Would he burst in here, puffed up with his own importance, threatening them, making demands? Would he set the house on fire? That seemed to be one of his favorite ways to close unpleasant chapters in his life. Or would he just leave them here?
Mira rocked back on her heels, altered her breathing, placed her palms flat against the floor. Let me see. The images flashed through her in vivid color, a glaring difference from when she had blundered onto Suki’s property and seen everything in negative images, black and white. Spenser, loading things onto a boat. Sheppard, closing a dead woman’s eyes. Cordoba, ranting. Goot, racing through wet trees. Smoke, fire, destruction. But where? Where is this happening? Or had it already happened? She didn’t know what any of it meant, where it belonged in time. She could see things, but couldn’t put any of it into a context that would help her or Adam.
Frustration washed through her and right behind it came its dark cousin, despair. Suki had paid her an enormous sum to find her son—and she’d done it, she had—but to what end? Had she saved Adam? No. Had she figured out what the hell was going on? Yes, bits of it here and there that included some weird psychic download from Joy Longwood that she couldn’t recall. A lot of good she was doing here.
Louder sounds down there, beneath her.
“We are so fucked,” she whispered.
No, you’re not.
A woman’s voice, clear, crisp, close. Mira looked around and saw a vague shape, as insubstantial as a shadow, pass through the wall. Then the shape solidified. A redhead, the woman in the photo Adam had shown her. Eden.
You need to know the layout of the house and there isn’t much time.
Mira took it in, all of it, all of her—the wild red hair, the freckles, the clothes, and suddenly understood the image she’d seen of Sheppard closing a dead woman’s eyes. Finch just returned from killing her.
Eden seemed to be aware of her thoughts. She nodded and said, Your friend asked for my help.
Sheppard, her Sheppard, asked a dead woman for help?
He understands more than you give him credit for. Now listen closely. Once you go through this door, turn right. There’s another bedroom at the end of the hail. It has a latch on the door, that’ll buy you some time, and a door that opens to a wraparound porch. It’s not controlled electronically. The stairs are on the other side of the porch, to your right. If you can get to the stairs before he does, run for the wooden gate or for the dock, where the boats are. You’ll see them as you go down the stairs to the front yard.
Might, maybe, what if. It seemed that Eden didn’t know any more about the immediate future than Mira did. That worried her. It meant that nothing beyond this point was certain for her and Adam.
There’s a cell phone on the desk, his backup. Grab it. And then run like hell. I’ll do what I can do help you, but there’s only so much I can do… from here. Hurry now. Wake Adam and go through with your plan.
Eden didn’t fade away—she simply winked out like a candle. Mira hurried over to the bed and woke Adam. “It’s time. Get in the cooler.” Then she repeated everything that Eden had told her.
Adam frowned. “How do you know all that, Mira?”
“A friend told me:” she said.
Suki tiptoed from the guest bedroom, past Kartauk snoozing on the living room couch, and went into the kitchen. She had slept for a couple of hours, and now she needed coffee and a bite to eat before she headed over to the makeshift command center. She couldn’t just stay here, waiting for news about Adam. At the center, she could at least field calls and feel that she was doing something useful.
She turned on a small desk lamp, started a pot of coffee, and helped herself to a container of fruit yogurt. Dolittle appeared and wound between her legs, meowing softly for attention, food, or both. Suki picked him up and pressed her face into his soft fur. He purred and drew his rough, warm tongue across her cheek. Ever since they’d gotten here, the cat had stuck close to her, as though he were afraid she might desert him, as Adam had done.
As Suki fed him from the supply of cat food she’d brought with her, she remembered that her car was at her house, where she’d left it when Kartauk had picked her up. Either he would have to drive her into town or she would have to borrow his car. She hated to wake him, to ask him for yet another favor. Besides, she knew he would try to discourage her from going into town. He would tell her to wait for Sheppard’s call. But Sheppard hadn’t called.
Suki filled a mug with coffee, then scribbled Kartauk a note. Didn’t have the heart to wake you. Went to Shep’s office. Call me if you want me to pick you up!
She went in search of his keys and ended up in his office, a large, comfortable room crowded with books, old newspapers, maps on every wall. Stacks of books stood on his floor, papers and folders were strewn across his desk, and off to one side of the desk was what looked like a manuscript, the pages neatly stacked. She remembered that Kartauk had published a number of books on criminology.
Suki glanced at the title page: The Face of Evil. She turned to the introduction and started to read. Ripples of shock shuddered through her. She became so absorbed in it that she didn’t become aware of Kartauk until he cleared his throat, startling her.
H
er head snapped up. Kartauk stood in the doorway, leaning heavily on his crutch, his eyes puffy from sleep. “I wrote the introduction after talking to Shep and Goot for the first time.”
“My God, Glen,” she breathed. “He’s your son? Spenser is your son?”
“Yes.” He whispered it. “November 1968. Vietnam. Hippies. Drugs. Janis Joplin. Hendrix. Protests. I was twenty-four years old, involved with a woman I didn’t love but who I figured I should marry. I went to Cape Cod to clear my head—and met Joy the first day I was there.” He raised his eyes. “I was in a bar. Saw her across the room, standing at the juice-box. And as corny as it sounds, the instant our eyes met, I knew she was it. I didn’t know at the time that she was on the run from Ray Connor.”
Emotions skittered across the curves of his face—pain, elation, regret.
“It was the single most intense ten days of my entire life. It was as if we both knew that what we’d found was doomed and we made every second count. I had gone up there for a long weekend, but kept extending my stay. So did she. Her mother got sick, my girlfriend kept calling, but we kept pushing the rest of the world away. By the time we both knew we had to leave, we had started talking about the future…”
He fell silent and shifted so that he now leaned against the door frame. He looked so bereft, so lost, that she wanted to put her arms around him and pat him on the back and assure him that it would be okay. But it wasn’t okay. Events that had happened decades ago were as fresh and vibrant in Kartauk’s mind as today. As right now. Even though Joy Longwood was long dead, Kartauk’s struggle and guilt continued.
“So what happened?” Suki finally asked.
“She went back to Ray, discovered she was pregnant, I got married, he threatened and then killed her mother, and eventually she fled, just like I told Shep. I didn’t know about the twins until she showed up here on Tango. By then, I had two kids with my wife and I couldn’t just…just leave her. So I divided my life between my wife and Joy. I kept telling myself that as soon as my kids were old enough—whenever that was going to be—I would divorce my wife and Joy and I would live happily ever after.” Another pause. “What horseshit. You can’t postpone happiness, Suki.”
It was as if he’d spoken these words specifically for her, for her situation with Paul. “But you had five years together here on Tango,” she said.
“A difficult five years in which I lived two distinct lives.”
Like Paul and his affairs. Except that none of his ladies had been the love of his life, she thought. He was too caught up in himself to love anyone the way Kartauk had loved Joy Longwood.
“What I learned is that were amazingly adaptable creatures, we humans. We can rationalize almost anything. Then something happens that throws all those neat rationalizations in our faces and suddenly, we’re fucked.” His eyes locked on hers. “That’s how I felt the day she died.”
“And Spenser? How did you feel about him?”
She saw immediately that it was a difficult question for him. He hobbled into the den, picked up a Magic Marker, crossed out the title, and beneath it scribbled: Spenser: The Face of Evil. He dropped the marker, stared at what he’d written.
“I’m supposed to be an expert on the criminal mind. But in all these years of studying people like Dahmer, Speck, Hitler, Bundy, Manson, and Susie Smith and Aileen Wournos, I’ve found only one consistent truth. DNA, upbringing, your parents, abuse… all those things are symptoms, not causes. Some people are just born evil.” He paused and met her gaze. “I think Mira probably would say that evil is one of the roles the soul agrees to play before it comes in. But I can’t buy that. It would mean that in terms of humanity, Hitler, for instance, would represent a collective spiritual lesson. And people like Bundy would represent the same thing, but on a much smaller scale.”
Suki looked at the manuscript pages that she held and set them back on top of the pile. She didn’t know what she believed about evil. “I don’t know shit about Hitler or Dahmer or Bundy. I just want my son back, Glen. And right now, I need to go to Shep’s office. May I borrow your car?”
“You need a curfew pass.”
“There’s one on your car.”
“I’ll take you there.”
She looked at his crutch, his cast, and reminded him that she had driven from her house to his.
“And I got from Shep’s to your place on my own,” he said, and slipped his hand into the pocket of his shorts and brought out his car keys. “Let’s get moving.”
Suki convinced Kartauk to let her drive his Mini Cooper. But it quickly became apparent that Kartauk’s cast wasn’t the issue; the weather was. The rain kept falling and every time they went through a puddle, she worried that the Mini would stall.
She called the command center, hoping to find out what, if anything, Sheppard had discovered at Eden’s home. “FBI Tip Line. How may I help you?”
“Ace? It’s Suki. What’re you doing there?”
“Lydia called Luke and me about Mira. We had some car trouble, so it took us a while to get back here. We’re relieving Lydia and the others.”
“What’ve you heard from Shep?”
“When did you last talk to him?”
“Right before he, Goot, and Ross left to track down Eden’s address.”
“Oh, uh, well, I don’t know how much I’m supposed to pass on. But what the hell,” he added, and the details spilled out.
Suki switched to speakerphone so that Kartauk could hear the conversation too. Sugarloaf. He had her son somewhere on Sugarloaf. And it was—what? Just thirty miles from here? It might as well have been three thousand miles. She had no way of getting there. The ferries had stopped running at midnight, no planes could take off or land. A brief, almost crippling despair welled up inside her.
“How the hell are they going to find one house on Sugarloaf, Ace?” Kartauk asked, leaning close to the phone.
“Beats me, sir. They, uh, haven’t advised me of their strategy. But I think they’re trying to locate him through his cell phone.”
A beep sounded, indicating she had a call coming through. Maybe it was Sheppard. “Ace, I’ve got another call coming through. Glen and I will see you shortly.”
She took it without looking at the number. “Hello?”
Static, breathing, then: “Remember Priscilla Branchley?”
That voice, that name. She swerved to the side of the road, braked. A violent shudder whipped through her and then it all made sense. “Scott Connor.” She could barely say the words.
He went on in a soft, insidious voice. “Very good. You at least remember my name.”
“You played the rotten son in that TV show that lasted nine or ten episodes. Long Hours. You auditioned for the male lead in Bluff.”
He gave a small, chilling laugh. “What a memory. Too bad I had to call you before you remembered. You know, that night I got Priscilla alone, she had her casting notes and showed me your comments on my audition.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Let me see if I can get it exactly right. Suki says he has homicidal eyes, Paul thinks he unhinged. Is that about right, Suki?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say. But if she kept him talking, maybe his location could be triangulated. Her thoughts raced. Kartauk tapped his watch and mouthed, Keep him talking. Then he entered a text message into his cell—to Sheppard, she hoped. “You were brilliant in your audition. You brought exactly the right edge to the male lead. But Priscilla thought you were too young for the part.” True. “The guy who got the lead was five or six years older than you.”
“I could’ve made myself look older. That’s not any reason to reject me. And just think how different everything would be if I’d gotten that role. Priscilla would be alive, I’d still be working in Hollywood, you wouldn’t know about Paul’s silly affairs, and you would still have your son. The penalty for our past decisions is often very harsh, don’t you think?”
Tears leaked from her eyes. Kartauk was busy text-messaging, but
gestured for her to keep up the dialogue. “What about the penalty to you for killing Priscilla and taking Adam?”
“Loneliness,” he said, his voice quiet. “Despair. No roots. I’ve been so many people since those days in Hollywood that I’m not even sure who I am anymore.”
“You don’t even know who your father was,” she rushed on. “Ray Connor wasn’t.”
Kartauk glanced up, mouthed, Yes, yes, that’s good, keep him talking.
“You don’t know shit about my father.”
“I know that your mother got pregnant on Cape Cod, where she went to get away from Ray, who was an abusive drunk. She met a man, fell in love, they went back to their respective lives to try to tie up loose ends, but that didn’t work. She tried to get away from Ray several times, but he beat her up, threatened to kill her mother, succeeded, and she gave birth to twins. She fled one night, but Ray found her. He eventually took your twin, Lyle, and she fled to Tango Key with you. And she moved into the Mango Hill house. You lived there until you were six. By then, Lyle was dead. He got hit by a car. So Ray came looking for you. He still believed you and Lyle were his. And he took you away. Do you remember that? Your real father was a cop and he looked for you for three years. He’s still looking for you. Would you like to speak to him? He’s here in the car with me.”
Silence, then an explosion of rage. “That’s horseshit. You think I don’t know what you’re doing, trying to keep me on the line with some goddamn story like that? You could say anything, but you don’t have proof. Kiss your fucking son good-bye, Suki, he’s…”
“You have a scar over your left eye, Spenser,” Kartauk said quickly. “You know how you got it?”
Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5) Page 29