9 More Killer Thrillers

by Russell Blake

  Wes almost didn’t check his email before dinner. And so he almost missed Diego Palomar’s alarming, exciting news.

  The truth was, Wes was going out of his way to not log in. The thing he hated about email was that it was supposed to be a modern version of snail mail, but everyone treated it like a phone call. When the phone rang, you felt compelled to answer, and then you had to deal with whoever was on the other line. When email came, you could respond when you had time and mental energy. But when you answered at once, you set an expectation.

  People thought they could email you whenever or wherever—Costa Rica on a late, lazy afternoon, with rain drumming on the roof. You wanted to sit in a hammock with a beer in your hand. Why would you be sitting at your computer or staring at your phone screen waiting for a new email? But if you didn’t respond, you’d wake up in the morning with worried subject lines: “Are you getting my emails???”

  To prove his point, while he was in the hammock, trying to read a book and listening to the rain against the balcony roof, Becca had been on the laptop, arguing with some state-run care center in Florida that refused to grant access to its patients. Then, going back and forth with an advocacy group in Canada that was requesting help.

  Wes wasn’t logged in, was reading a novel to distract himself from worrying about his brother at Colina Nublosa. But he kept reading the same page over and over again. At last he decided to get up and check email in case Uncle Davis was on him about something. He was pretending to be in Vermont, after all.

  He rolled out of the hammock and pulled himself up to the laptop on the patio table when Becca stepped away. He scanned a forum where people came to discuss paralysis treatments, then relented and logged into his email. The first message was from diego.p@colinanublosa.com.

  Subject: eric and the paralyzed patient

  Wes’s stomach lurched. Eric had been found out. Caught trying to film Meggie Kerr.

  He opened the email and stared at it, reading it twice, his heart rate accelerating to a gallop.

  Becca came back onto the patio, carrying her e-reader, as if she’d finally relented and decided to relax. “What’s wrong? It isn’t Uncle Davis, is it?”

  He pulled out a chair for her and tilted the computer so she could see the screen. “Better read this.”

  Wes reread the email as Becca leaned in. She sucked in her breath.

  Message: I know why you sent eric to colina nublosa. I’m sorry but I kept asking him questions after I saw you at devil’s cauldron and he isn’t very good at keeping secrets so he told me everything. I know you’re trying to get meggie kerr out and get her help. You only need proof. I want to help you do it.

  The problem is there is a woman here named catelin and I think she knows meggie from a long time back. And she is suspicious that someone is trying to help. She has been asking around. At dinner I saw her watching me and I started to get nervous. If you saw her you would know why. After eric showed me the phone I went to Mr Usher and asked who she was. He said not to mess with her and she could make sure I got arrested by the police or worse. When I asked about meggie he got really angry.

  I need this job because I’ve got a wife and two kids at home. And I’m getting scared of this woman. I can’t meet you, but I can help you get your proof. After dinner, I’m going to hang around the property instead of going home. Then I’m going to sneak in and use your phone camera to ask meggie kerr some questions. Do you remember where I saw you this afternoon at the cauldrons??

  I’m going to wrap the phone in a black plastic bag so it won’t get wet and I’m going to leave it at the huge tree behind the cauldron. The one with the branch that almost touches the ground and the buttress roots. I’ll tuck it into the hollow where the branch and the trunk meet and you can find it there.

  Once you have the phone you should get your brother out. He’s not safe here.

  Please delete this message after you get it. I’m writing this from work and I think they might look at our emails.

  Sincerely,

  Diego Palomar

  Becca leaned back in her chair. “He doesn’t understand how email works if he thinks deleting it is going to do anything.”

  Wes had already hit reply and started typing, but now canceled the unsent message. “Shouldn’t have used a work computer in the first place.”

  “What are you thinking? What is it?”

  “We’ve figured it out,” he said. “Or at least some of it.”

  Her eyes lit up. “I think I see where you’re going, but go on—I want to hear it.”

  “Remember what you said when the Ministry of Health shut us down?”

  “Not exactly. Something about nobody caring whether Meggie got help or not, right?”

  “Almost,” Wes said. “You said someone actively wanted her not to get help.”

  “Not her own family. They’re completely out of the picture. Indifferent. Had to be her inlaws.”

  “Right, but that was a series of dead ends, too. Benjamin was the obvious suspect, but we found that tearful interview with him at the Las Vegas hospital a few days after the accident. He seemed broken up.”

  “Remorse,” Becca said. “Acting. Or maybe it was an accident, but whatever happened in the cave may have been his fault and he wanted to hide it.”

  “He seemed legitimately distraught,” Wes said. “But okay. Then how do you account for the fact that he went ahead and married her anyway, after the accident. If he wanted to be rid of her, that’s a poor way to do it.”

  “Point taken.”

  “So we thought maybe one of the brothers,” Wes said. “They don’t like each other much these days. There have been lawsuits back and forth over control of the coffee company. It’s a chilly relationship. But what does that have to do with Meggie? You know what I’m thinking, don’t you?”

  “The cousin. What was her name?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Wes opened his docs folder from the cloud and did a search for the name “Catelin,” from Diego’s email, and every variation of the spelling he could think of. He found it. Kaitlyn Potterman. She worked for Tropical Beans, mainly over IT. A minor player in the company, which is why they’d dismissed her in the first place. The only red flag was a mention of her name in a lawsuit accusing the company of installing keystroke logging software on a competitor’s computers. The case was settled out of court.

  There was no apparent motive for this case. But what do you know, Wes’s notes showed that she’d been on the caving expedition where Meggie had taken her fall.

  He turned the laptop to show Becca, who shook her head as she read. Her face darkened. “Pull up that hospital video.”

  He opened a browser and found the video link in his bookmarks. They watched it, and sure enough, there was a woman standing behind Benjamin. This was seven years old, but in the video she had a youthful, fresh look. The sort of face you’d glance at because it was pretty, but wouldn’t otherwise focus on. But as he studied her now, with Benjamin’s sobs coming through the laptop speakers, something about her seemed off.

  The expression on her face looked plastered on, like faux concern. And why was she standing so close to Benjamin? Her hand rested protectively on the small of his back and when he broke down finally, he buried his head on her shoulder. The video cut back to the newscasters, who started in on the dangers of caving in the desert and other accidents in Nevada over the years. Wes backed up the video and froze it to study the woman’s face. She looked vaguely familiar.

  “It has to be her,” Becca said. “But what’s the motive? Meggie is her cousin’s fiancé slash wife. Why would she care?”

  “I don’t know. We can figure that part out later. What we need now is my phone.” He tabbed back to Diego’s email. “Do you know what tree he’s talking about?”

  “I don’t remember it,” she said. “But it shouldn’t be hard to find. We’ll go up first thing in the morning.”

  Wes looked at his watch. “This only came half an
hour ago. They’re sitting down to dinner now. Another hour, then bedtime, then Diego gets the film. Then he has to hike up to Devil’s Cauldron to leave the phone. If we hurry, we can cross the lake and meet him there.”

  “It’s raining and it’s almost dark. How are we going to hire a lancha to take us across?”

  “The boat owners all live right on the lakefront. I’m sure for enough money, they’ll brave the weather.”

  “And wait on the other side while we slog up in the dark to get the phone?” Becca shrugged. “Yeah, all right. It’s worth it if we can get Meggie and Eric out of there.”

  “And warn Diego that Usher might have seen his email. Maybe Kaitlyn has, too. She’s in IT, after all.”

  “Good point.”

  Wes shut down the computer, and they retreated to their room to change. Outside, Wes whacked his boots together to knock off the mud, then took the backpack Becca handed him. It was surprisingly heavy.

  “What have you got in here, your guidebooks?”

  “Water bottles, some snacks for the pregnant woman. Flashlights and spare batteries.”

  “It’s like a major expedition.”

  “And something I bought in the village.” She unzipped a pocket and unsheathed a nasty, curved fishing knife. Being gripped in the hands of a pregnant woman somehow made it even more vicious looking.

  “If you think we’ll need that, there’s no way I’m letting you hike up there.”

  “I’d have bought a gun, if we were back in the States.” Becca’s expression hardened. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that people will go to any lengths to cover their crimes.”

  “We should call the cops.”

  “We already tried the Costa Rican government. You want to go back to those guys?”

  “No.”

  Becca dropped the knife in the pack. “Then we’ll take care of this ourselves. And if anyone touches Eric or Meggie, they’ll be sorry.”

  He eyed her with fresh respect. “I would hate to be the bully who messes with our kid. You’re going to be some momma bear.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Meggie must have hit the boulder on her way down. Slammed into it, then not fallen the rest of the way into the shaft. That was the only thing that made sense. Otherwise, she’d have died in the fall.

  Seven years later, lying paralyzed in her bed, listening to the rain pour through the jungle canopy to drum on the roof, she couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. What had happened next?

  Meggie must have lain on that rock for hours. Right in sight of Kaitlyn, who had lost one rope down the shaft, but still had the other. Why didn’t she climb down to finish the job and push her off the boulder? Meggie must have looked dead already. Or so close to it that Kaitlyn figured she’d never make it out of the desert. But she hadn’t counted on Duperre doing his job. He must have summoned help: a rescue crew and a life flight.

  When Meggie clawed her way out of a coma several weeks later she was on a private flight to Costa Rica. She had no memory of anything after the fall and even that had come back only over the course of weeks. Meanwhile, she was terrified to discover that her body no longer worked. She could move her eyes, twitch one finger and nothing else. It was like being squeezed in that stone hole at the bottom of the cave all over again.

  After a few weeks of care in Costa Rica, Benjamin came down with Kaitlyn, and some government official appeared and pronounced Benjamin and Meggie married. What a bunch of bullshit. Nobody bothered to ask her. Why would Benjamin do it? Apparently so he could take over her affairs as her so-called spouse. And that meant Kaitlyn was in charge.

  They were talking in the hall right now. The rain was white noise that muffled the low voices and kept the words indistinct. The tone was clear enough though. Kaitlyn, commanding, needling, or conniving, as the case demanded. Benjamin, reluctant, whiny. But too weak to stand up to her.

  Meggie’s stomach lurched at the memory of the torture in the hydrotherapy baths. Kaitlyn had lowered her into the water, waited until she’d almost drowned, then hauled her out.

  Defy her. Tell Benjamin the truth.

  But how? She could blink and she could move her right index finger. If someone asked the right questions, she could answer. Kaitlyn would control the situation. Make sure that only wrong questions were asked.

  Benjamin raised his voice. “I can’t do it. It’s too much.”

  “Shh!”

  Their voices lowered again. Moments later, the door swung open. Two figures stepped into the darkened room. Kaitlyn moved to the doors that led onto the covered back deck and swung them open, then turned on the porch light.

  Rain ran in sheets off the roof, forming a curtain of water beyond the deck. The air was as thick and humid as pond scum. It shimmered around the deck light, which reached into the room to cast everything in gray.

  “Hello, Meggie,” Benjamin said. He stood above her bed, but turned away when she met his gaze. “Sorry it has been so long.”

  How long? Six months, at least. He used to visit regularly in the first couple of years after the accident. He’d sit in the corner, sometimes quiet and brooding. Other times, talking. Justifying bad behavior, complaining about his two brothers, who didn’t think he was running the company right. Sometimes, he even complained about Kaitlyn, but not often.

  What he didn’t do, what he never did, was let Meggie talk. Her mouth was stiff and her vocal cords dead, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have communicated. He could have asked her to blink answers, could have moved a paper with letters on it beneath her tapping finger. She would have told him what Kaitlyn had done. Warned him that she was playing him. Anything to penetrate the mind-numbing spell his cousin had cast over him. But he never asked her to blink so much as her preference in slippers.

  “She knows,” Kaitlyn said to him. “I don’t know how, but she found out.”

  Meggie’s heart thumped in her chest. No waiting around—the woman slithered right to her monstrous revelation.

  Benjamin chewed his lip. “Do you suppose she’s remembering? After all this time, the details of the fall are coming back to her?”

  “What are you talking about?” Kaitlyn let out a harsh, barking laugh. “Oh, that? She’s known that all along.”

  He drew back a pace. “She does? How does she know?”

  “Because I told her.”

  “Why would you do that?” he whined.

  “Why shouldn’t she know? You want her to think it was my fault? That I was the one who tied the rope? That my knots were crap and they made her fall? Hah. No, she’s known all along. It was the first thing I told her when she woke up, that you were the one who tied the rope. That when search and rescue tried to figure out what had gone wrong, you lied and blamed it on her.”

  You liar, Meggie thought, but not at Benjamin. You tried to kill me. It wasn’t him, it was you.

  She had plenty of reasons to hate Benjamin after everything he had done. Or not done, as the case may be. He could have stood up for her a million times, from the moment Kaitlyn bullied them through the final squeeze, to when he had left her here to rot. But the fall was his cousin’s doing. Not his.

  “Meggie, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to, I promise.” He turned to Kaitlyn, confusion spreading across his face. “Wait, if that’s not it, what are you talking about? What did she find out?”

  “You know what.” She sidled up to Benjamin and put an intimate hand on the back of his neck. She turned on her sultry voice and whispered in his ear, just loud enough for Meggie to hear. “What you did to me. What you’re still doing to me.”

  He staggered back. His eyes whipped over to Meggie, then looked away just as quickly. The guilt on his face was enough to confirm what Kaitlyn had claimed a couple of days earlier in the hydrotherapy room.

  While Meggie sat gasping for breath after coming out of the tub, with water streaming down her face and body, Kaitlyn had explained.

  “The reason I destroyed
you,” she had said, “and the reason you never had a chance against me, is because Benjamin loves me. Or thinks he does. It’s really a sick fascination. I’ve known it since I was fourteen and I showed him my breasts when we were swimming at the lake. I took off my top and he didn’t look away. He was seventeen and knew better, but he stared.”

  Under other circumstances, hearing this disgusting news would have only increased her hatred for Benjamin. But that paled compared to fear of Kaitlyn and her absolute loathing of the woman. Whatever Benjamin’s guilt, she was sure that Kaitlyn had known exactly what she was doing when she took off her top.

  “You must be shocked,” Kaitlyn had said. “And you’d be more shocked to hear that I slept with him. We were in college, and still close—of course I was going to go to the same school. I was finishing my freshman year, and he’d just turned twenty-one and was going to be a senior. He took me to a stupid frat party where we drank too much. We ended up in a bedroom, making out. Nothing crazy, only the normal things we’d done before.”

  Sure, the normal things. Like all cousins did, right? If Meggie could have shut her ears, she would have. But she was compelled to listen as Kaitlyn shared the details.

  “He was drunk, and I tried to get him to sleep with me. But he pushed me away, mumbled that it wasn’t right. Later, we went back downstairs.

  “When he called the next day, I thought he was going to be angry that I’d tried to get his pants off. But he couldn’t remember. He was worried, he thought something had happened between us, but he didn’t know. I started to cry. ‘You don’t remember?’ I said. ‘How could you not remember?’ No, he didn’t remember a thing.”

  “‘I told you to stop,’ I said. ‘But you wouldn’t. You kept pushing and pushing. Eventually I—’” Kaitlyn’s voice broke, as if she were upset by the memory. “‘Eventually, I gave in.’”

  She stared into Meggie’s eyes and wiped away her own, where she’d raised real tears. A smile replaced the hurt look. “From that moment he was mine. I knew he’d give me whatever I wanted. And he did. The next time, we did sleep together—the second time is always easier, after all. Don’t close your eyes!”