by C. J. Lyons
As the Ford careened across a field of corrugated packed earth, sparse grass, and spindly weeds, she focused on the trailer. No signs of life. What happened? Had Zoe tripped some sort of IED the men from All American had planted?
The fire was now dancing across the dried branches and leaves covering the trailer’s roof, threatening to leap across to the next trailer. Morgan honked her horn, hoping to alert the other residents. 911, she reminded herself—she was so used to taking care of disasters herself that the thought of alerting the authorities barely registered. But someone else would need to make the call; she couldn’t spare the time.
She skidded to a stop as close to the trailer with its flying debris as she dared, and ran toward the front deck.
“Zoe!” she called. Her words were flung back into her face in a whirlwind of smoke and pungent ash that left her gagging.
Morgan had almost died twice in fires. It was one of the few things she feared. The last thing she wanted was to face it again. But when a figure appeared at the trailer’s front door, only the silhouette of a hand climbing up from the floor, reaching in vain for the handle, she knew she had to swallow her fear.
She zipped her jacket tight, pulling the collar up over her nose and mouth, squinted her eyes, pulled the sleeves down over her hands, and sprinted across the patchy grass and up the steps to the trailer. The doorknob was hot but not scorching, and she was able to grab it and open the door.
A man tumbled out onto the deck, landing at her feet. His clothing was singed and his face and hands blistered red. He was coughing hard, his entire body convulsing with the effort. She wrapped her arms around his chest and dragged him off the deck to safety.
“Was a someone else in there? Did you see a girl?” she asked him.
He raised his arm to point at the trailer and nodded, still coughing too hard to speak.
Flames framed the doorway and roiled along the ceiling beyond it. The smoke had cleared a bit, just enough to make it seem as if it wouldn’t be difficult to search the narrow single-wide.
Morgan knew better. She remembered how smoke could choke you with its heat and toxins without you seeing more than a wisp of it. She’d seen firsthand how treacherous and unpredictable flames could be, first opening a path to follow and then quickly closing it behind you. Not to mention the intense heat.
Still, she had to try.
Twice she approached the door to the trailer and twice she lost her nerve. But then the trailer shuddered, swaying on its moorings, and she knew it was now or never. The front windows blew out and the flames surged toward the fresh air, pulling away from the entrance.
Cowering low and holding her breath, she ran inside. To her right was a small eat-in kitchen. No one there. To her left was the living room and beyond it the bedrooms. Smoke and steam rose from the carpet that seemed to be melting into the subfloor.
Stay low, stay low, became her mantra as she crab-walked, feeling her way more than seeing. At one point the floor gave way, almost sucking her down with it, but luckily she hadn’t committed all her weight and was able to shift away. She detoured to one side and touched a soft object. A body.
It moaned. Her lungs burning, eyes blinded by smoke, she grabbed hold of whatever body part was closest to her—a leg—and hauled. It was another man. Thankfully, skinnier than the first. Once she got a good grip on both his ankles, she was able to drag him free.
On the deck outside, she paused to fill her lungs and blink her vision clear. The treated lumber was smoking, so she didn’t wait long before resuming her efforts. Thankfully two men appeared from the other trailers and took the man from her.
Morgan ended up on the grass beside the first man she’d rescued. He was coughing less now, tears streaming down his soot-streaked face. He was wearing a formal suit, a once-white shirt, expensive shoes. Then she noticed the empty shoulder holster beneath his left arm. “Did you hurt her? Did you hurt Zoe?”
He shook his head still coughing. “She did it. Started the fire.” He gasped for air, and his coughing slowed. “Bitch tried to kill us. Jumped us and escaped out the back. Left us to die.”
Morgan sat back on her heels as more neighbors streamed out of their homes to watch Zoe’s trailer collapse in on itself. “She’s gone?”
He nodded.
“Who sent you? What did you want with Zoe?”
His eyes narrowed. “Who the hell are you?”
He grabbed her arm and patted his pockets with his free hand, as if searching for a phone or handcuffs or a weapon. Morgan wrenched away and climbed to her feet.
She wasn’t going to get any answers here. Her answers had fled—along with Zoe.
Chapter Fourteen
Morgan drove away from the scene just as the first fire trucks and cop cars arrived. The Ford felt a bit shaky—its front-end alignment was definitely off—but otherwise had survived unscathed. Obeying all laws, she drove back to the mansion on Hilton Head, the last place anyone would look for homeless Hildy Smith.
The house was private and quiet—exactly why she’d chosen it—with a pool, complete with waterfall and spa, sheltered behind a tall privacy fence. She stripped free of her smoke-ruined clothes and dove in, naked. After almost drowning last month, one of the first things she’d done after arriving in Hilton Head was to sign up for swimming lessons.
Funny how her only fears were elemental in nature. Men like her father did not scare her. But random acts of nature—that was another story. Fears of fire, of drowning, of being buried alive, of too-small places with not enough air. She seldom dreamed, but on the rare occasions she did, it was of these primal cataclysms; intense, disturbing night terrors that all ended in her death.
Too exhausted to swim, she floated, then rinsed her hair beneath the waterfall before climbing into the hot tub. Finally, she forced herself out of its warm embrace and went inside to dry herself off and find fresh clothes.
The king-sized bed with its lighter-than-air duvet looked tempting, but she knew she’d never sleep, not with so many stray facts pinballing through her brain. Instead, she walked the beach until sunrise.
She tried to work the case, figure out where Zoe might go next, but all she could think about was how beautiful the ocean looked in the moonlight and how the pre-dawn sky turned it almost exactly the same shade of blue as Micah’s eyes and how much he would love it here. His artistic talents would turn the wet sand and foamy water into a brilliant, evocative painting, she was certain.
She tried taking photos to send to Micah but ended up sitting in the sand, her feet in the surf, watching the gulls pick at a dead horseshoe crab washed up beside her, and wondering if she’d ever see him again.
There was no way she could go home. Not until she’d done what she’d come to do: stop a killer. Even if that killer was Zoe.
Maybe not even then. The waves tickled her toes. It wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Wandering the country, living in places like this? The thought reminded her of something her father once told her after he’d been caught and the media was making a big deal about how an idyllic town as New Hope had been home to a sadistic serial killer for decades.
Every paradise creates the serpent it deserves, he’d said. Maybe that was the answer to Morgan’s search: find the paradise where she could play serpent, without risking getting caught like her father.
Was that what Zoe was doing? All of her victims had been wealthy, all employed in high-ranking positions. Among them were a CFO of a web development company, a financial advisor who specialized in clients making eight figures a year or more, the owner of a popular restaurant chain. Most of the victims had been married with children. They were all ages, but eight out of the nine were white, while the ninth was Asian. Why had she chosen them? And how?
Had she done background checks on them when they called into All America thinking they were speaking to a well-meaning customer service rep?
No. Wait. Morgan stood up, shielding her eyes at the stray beams of sunlight streaming over the horizo
n. Why would Zoe need data from the secured All American server room if she could already target her victims straight from her computer terminal in the customer care center?
She frowned. There was another problem with her theory that Zoe was the killer Morgan was tracking: all but one of the victims Morgan had found were killed before Zoe began working at All American.
Maybe Zoe wasn’t the killer? Even though she’d admitted to killing the man in Augusta, maybe she had been looking for something else at All American, something in their data. Just like Morgan.
Maybe Zoe and Morgan were even more alike than she’d thought. Could they both be on the trail of the same killer?
Energized by the idea, she ran back to the house and grabbed her laptop and a protein shake. So many questions. Who were the men chasing her and Zoe? Did they work for All American? Seemed likely, given how bold they were—shooting at Zoe, searching the storage facility. What was in the All American servers that they were protecting from Zoe? Call center client data wasn’t valuable enough to warrant murder for hire.
Were they the same men who’d been in Zoe’s trailer? Again, seemed likely.
Did they—whoever “they” were—have any connection to the man Zoe had killed in Augusta? The one who’d tried to buy her from Curtis Troy.
Something niggled at her with that idea. Something Zoe had told her…added to something Allen had said as a joke that she’d only half-heard over the din of the pub. What was it?
Allen had said something about it being a good thing Spencer Kagan, the owner of All American, was such a nice guy. Otherwise he’d wonder if a man like him who owned a mattress warehouse, a hunk of bandwidth along with his own dedicated phone and data lines, and a complex filled with empty garages wasn’t shooting porn.
“I mean, do the math,” he’d said. “What more do you need but a few beds, some privacy, and the Internet?”
Porn? If it was specialty, illegal porn—like the snuff film of an under-aged kidnap victim—now that could be worth killing to keep secret. Maybe that was the connection between Zoe’s victim and All American?
She frowned. It felt close, like seeing the tip of an extremely large and jagged iceberg. No, better yet, like feeling the rattle of an unseen snake hiding in the grass.
No way could she go back to All American. The men from the trailer would have figured out who she—or Hildy—was by now. And once the police were done with their crime scene investigation of Gavin’s death, security at All American would be on high alert.
Which meant to find any answers, she needed to find Zoe.
She went back over her short time with the All American staff, reviewing everything they’d said in hopes of some clue to where Zoe might have fled.
And then she smiled. Once again, Allen—whom she’d pretty much written off as an asshole—had provided the answer she needed.
At least she hoped so.
Chapter Fifteen
Morgan spent the morning cleaning the mansion, erasing all traces of her ever being there. It was a ritual she’d performed so often that it had become a strange form of mindfulness meditation. Becoming a ghost, vanishing without a hint that she’d ever existed.
The thought brought her up short. Maybe Nick was right; she was lonely. Before she met him and Micah and Andre and Jenna, she’d never thought twice about clearing her tracks—it was a simple task, essential for survival. Now all of a sudden it had become some kind of existential crisis?
She had eaten lunch and was burning her clothing from the fire in the barbeque pit beside the pool when Micah called. Again. She declined to answer. Again.
He left a voice message. Unusual, since if they couldn’t talk he would send a text—almost never a voice message. Micah hated talking to machines; in fact, although he could talk with Morgan for hours, any other time he was so quiet that people often assumed he wasn’t intelligent enough to sustain a conversation.
People were stupid that way.
Curiosity got the better of her, and she finally listened to his message as she left the island and drove to Bluffton.
“Hey, it’s me. You knew that already. But, yeah, I just wanted to say, to tell you, that I shouldn’t have gone to the prom with Bethany, even if I just went as a friend. It’s just that I miss you so much. And I know she’s nothing like you, but she’s smart and funny and I can talk to her.”
“Definitely nothing like me then,” Morgan told the Ford, hating herself for being jealous of a girl she’d never even met. Bethany was good for Micah—she definitely would never almost get him killed. Unlike Morgan.
The message continued. “Anyway, it occurred to me that before I agreed to accompany Bethany to her prom, I should have invited you to mine. Just because I couldn’t graduate with my friends back at Schenley doesn’t mean we shouldn’t, you and I, go to my prom next year. So, check the pics I just texted you—but it’s hard to take a selfie in a tux holding a bouquet of roses, so it maybe didn’t come out. And,” he heaved in a dramatic breath, “Morgan Ames, would you do me the honor of accompanying me to the senior prom next May?” There was a pause. “Thanks, and I look forward to your reply. And,” he added in a rush, “come home soon, won’t you? I miss you.”
Morgan blinked. What the hell? He expected her to plan something a year from now? As if he would still want her a year from now? As if he were that certain they’d still be together, that she wouldn’t get him killed before then, that she wouldn’t get herself killed, or do something to disgust him, to send him away, like killing someone else?
“You’re an idiot, Micah Chase,” she shouted at the traffic surrounding her. But for some reason she was smiling.
Then she replayed the message again. And again. By the fifth time, she felt like crying—although she didn’t. Morgan didn’t do tears. Someone like Micah, a guy so patient and smart and special and talented and…nice…he didn’t belong with someone like Morgan. Guys like Micah, they belonged with girls named Heather or Tiffany…or Bethany.
Girls who wouldn’t hurt them, even if that was the last thing in the universe that they ever wanted to do.
The navigation app told her she’d arrived at her destination. Allen’s house was a modest yellow brick ranch in an older, well-established development off May River Road. There was a gray minivan parked in the driveway bearing the emblem of a home nursing agency.
If Zoe hadn’t left town, Morgan was pretty sure this was where she’d be. Not because of any sentimental fondness for Allen’s dad, but because there was no way in hell Zoe would risk the data she’d stolen being found at her trailer. She’d have backed it up in the cloud, but if she were smart, she’d also have a hard drive backup hidden someplace safe.
Where better to hide it than in the home of an old man with Alzheimer’s, who Zoe had good reason to visit without arousing suspicion?
She parked down the street and watched the house. It was just past one o’clock, and the sun bounced off the car’s hood right into her eyes. She collected the bits of Micah’s sunglasses, reinserted her lock picks into the earpieces, and slid them on.
Morgan wondered why she was dawdling. Far more than her normal paranoid scrutiny of a location called for. Was she secretly hoping to give Zoe enough time to leave without a trace? Was she really willing to let a killer walk free just because she saw herself in Zoe?
Whatever the answer, she couldn’t stall any longer. She made a quick call from a burner phone, then called Allen from Hildy’s phone. “Hi again. Listen, I know this isn’t my place, being new and all, but everyone said how much your father liked Gavin, so I was wondering if it would help if I stopped by to visit him?”
He heaved a sigh of relief. “Thanks. That would be great. His caregiver leaves at three. Zoe’s here, but she might need to leave, and I just got called in to talk to the detectives. I have no idea how long I’ll be.”
Morgan knew all about the call from the sheriff’s department—she’d just made it, spoofing their number on the burner. Since the detecti
ves were housed in the main sheriff’s station up in Beaufort, almost an hour away, and Allen walking in and asking to speak to the detectives in charge of Gavin’s death investigation would immediately arouse suspicion, she was certain he’d be gone for hours.
Plenty of time for her to convince Zoe to give her the data. Beyond that, what to do about the fact that Zoe had caused at least two deaths that Morgan knew about—three, if you counted Curtis Troy’s impending execution—she had no idea.
After watching Allen drive away and not seeing anyone else interested in the brick ranch, Morgan left the Ford and walked up the sidewalk to the house. There were roses lining the drive, their bright blooms filling the air with perfume, and she felt a sudden pang of homesickness. It would be another month before they bloomed in Pennsylvania, depending on the weather. Or maybe it would been warm enough that they’d already bloomed and she’d missed them.
As she rang the bell she wondered how she could be homesick if she’d never had a home. She shook her head and focused on the job at hand. Time for Hildy.
A black woman in her forties dressed in nursing scrubs opened the door. “Yes, can I help you?”
“I’m here to visit Allen’s dad?” Hildy wasn’t as certain as Morgan. “I’m a friend of his and Zoe’s from All American.”
“You just missed Allen, but he said you might be stopping by. Hildy, right?” The woman gestured for her to come in. “I’m Gladys, Mr. Alfie’s care giver. It’s so sweet for you girls to concern yourself with him—you know how sensitive Alzheimer patients can be to changes in their environment. Mr. Alfie has been agitated ever since Allen got home last night. It’s so dreadful what happened to poor Mr. Gavin. He was such a sweetheart. He was over here visiting almost every weekend, he and that nice partner of his, Mitchell.”