Wicked Lies

by Lisa Jackson

  Recognition lit her eyes. “Now I remember you. I saw you on television in conjunction with that shooting outside the nightclub. You thought there was more to it.”

  Harrison snorted. “I’m a conspiracy theorist, if you believe Bill Koontz’s lawyers and the implication of Pauline Kirby and her news crew.”

  “Koontz was your brother-in-law’s business partner?” she clarified, her eyebrows pulling together as she pieced together what she’d heard.

  He nodded. “He’s sole proprietor of Boozehound now. Manny’s dead. And my sister and niece got next to nothing.”

  “You believe Koontz set up your brother-in-law to be murdered.”

  “You got it. I can’t prove it. Yet. But I will.” He added, “I lost my job at the Portland Ledger over the way I handled the story, but again, I wasn’t wrong.”

  She thought that over. Opened her mouth several times to say something, then closed it again. Finally, she said carefully, “If you stay ahead of the police on this story . . . if you could find Justice first, or a lead to him . . . that would go a long ways to reestablishing your credibility, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well. Yes. Of course.” He gazed at her seriously.

  “Okay,” she said and inhaled a long, shivery breath as she dropped onto the couch.

  “Okay?”

  “I want you to help me. Really help me, and my family. I want you to keep us safe from Justice, and in return I’ll try to lead you to him, or, more accurately, allow him to be led to me.” She shivered as she spoke, as if she felt she were treading on the graves of the undead.

  “Okay,” he repeated.

  They looked at each other.

  After a moment, Harrison asked, “So, how exactly do you call Justice?”

  “If I drop the wall down for a moment, he’ll sense me.” She glanced away, as if embarrassed at how silly it sounded.

  “So . . .” He lifted his palms, silently asking what she wanted to do next.

  “I don’t . . . I just can’t do it yet. I’m afraid,” she admitted.

  He nodded, watching her. “Got any kind of timeline on that?”

  She half laughed but still worried her hands. “No. I’ve just got to work up my courage. It’s . . . it’s not that easy.”

  “Okay. Yeah. I see. I’ll wait till you’re ready.” And in truth, he wasn’t too thrilled about the prospects of her communicating with Turnbull. If there were another way, if he could hunt down the bastard personally, or find a way to sic the police onto him, that would be better. But, for now, there weren’t any other options.

  She gazed at him through wide, soulful eyes. “Thanks. I’m just . . . I need . . . to know that my sisters are all going to be safe. I don’t want to make things worse.” She closed her eyes for a second, buried her face in her hands. “If I did anything to hurt any one of them, I don’t think I could live with myself.”

  “I’m not going to let him hurt you,” he said, meaning it.

  “Us,” she said softly.

  “All of you,” he said. “Catherine. Your sisters. But no one’s safe while he’s on the loose. Trust me, Lorelei, I just want to get him.”

  “And write about it.” She lifted her head and smiled then, without a trace of humor. He felt a small twinge of conscience at using her for his own purposes, but he meant to keep her safe. He’d promised himself.

  “And write about it,” he admitted.

  CHAPTER 16

  The hospital’s van was winched from the gully by its back axle. Once at the top of the mesa, it was given a cursory examination by the detectives before being loaded onto a flatbed and hauled to the department for forensic scrutiny.

  Langdon Stone walked to his Jeep and waited for Savvy Dunbar, who’d accompanied him after she’d gotten back from visiting Mad Maddie at Seagull Pointe. Savvy wasn’t known for idle chitchat, but she’d been dead quiet the whole trip. “What’s eating you?” he asked as Savvy approached.

  “I was thinking about whom he found to give him a ride.”

  Lang nodded. The thought had been circling his mind as well. “Whoever it is, if they’re still alive, they’re in danger.”

  “Big-time,” she said, staring at the road where the tow truck with its cargo of a mangled hospital van had disappeared. “What time do you think they picked him up?”

  “You mean, they probably weren’t listening to the news and/or hadn’t had time to talk to anyone to be warned about Justice.”

  Nodding thoughtfully, she tucked an errant strand of reddish-brown hair behind her ear. She was too pretty to be a cop, in Lang’s opinion, not that he hadn’t seen his share of lookers on the force, but for one reason or another they seemed to move on quickly. He expected Savvy to last another six months at the most.

  “He drove off from Halo Valley around six or six thirty,” Lang said, going through the timeline. “Headed west. Got to the turnoff and drove through the chain around sevenish? Had ditched the van by seven fifteen or seven thirty. Walked back to the road and waited. Somebody came along and he flagged them down.”

  “He would have been in his inmate clothes,” Savvy said.

  “A woman wouldn’t have stopped for him, most likely.”

  “Not a man, either. Not dressed the way he was.”

  Lang thought that over. “If he was on foot, we’d have found him by now.”

  “Is there anyone he could have contacted to help him?”

  “Not that we know of.” Lang grimaced. “The man had no friends, and he tried to kill all his relatives. Even his mother.”

  Savvy opened the passenger door to Lang’s Jeep and climbed inside. Lang slid into the driver’s seat and gave her a sideways look. “There something you’re not telling me about her?”

  “I hope we find him soon,” was her only answer.

  Laura felt almost ill with worry. Promising was one thing; following through was quite another. She’d said she would let down her guard. Allow Justice into her thoughts. She’d promised; then she’d backed off.

  But it wasn’t just herself she was thinking of: it was her baby, too. Justice wanted to harm them both. And that was how he’d found her. Something to do with the baby she didn’t really understand, but that was why she was in his crosshairs now.

  Harrison, after convincing her that he was really on her side, had then brought his laptop into her house and was currently balanced on one of her kitchen café chairs, typing across the keyboard with surprising alacrity. When she’d started waffling about “calling” Justice, he’d simply made himself comfortable and mumbled something about catching up on his notes.

  Laura had tried not to pace. She’d tried not to think too much about the baby growing inside her and the fate of Catherine and her sisters should Justice actually get past their defenses. She knew she was the most vulnerable, because she seemed to be the one he’d most zeroed in on. Because she was outside the gates? Because she was pregnant? Maybe both?

  Maybe she should go to the police. Lay it all out and take her chances with them. But the explanations would be so messy, and she knew she would be believed even less by them than Harrison Frost.

  Could she really count on Harrison to be her ally? It seemed kind of unlikely except that he had something to gain, too. And so far he was the only one who knew she was related to the women at Siren Song.

  And, well, she liked him.

  Laura ran her hands through her hair, closed her eyes, shook her head at herself. She dragged her gaze from Harrison’s shoulders as he bent over the laptop and concentrated instead on her own relationship with the man who wanted to take her life, Justice Turnbull.

  When she was younger, she had sensed Justice but hadn’t been fully aware of what his voice was trying to say, what he was planning. Her gift hadn’t been as refined then, and she’d only been interested in the messages that crossed her mind in a mild eavesdropping way. She hadn’t understood that he was a killer until he began his rampage two years earlier, and then, just as his voice had crystallized in he
r consciousness, he’d been captured and incarcerated, his sibilant, hissing tones disappearing with him inside the walls of Halo Valley Security Hospital.

  Thank God.

  But then, yesterday . . . was it just yesterday? . . . his voice had suddenly blasted into her head again. Louder. Persistent. Boiling over with his hateful need to hurt them all!

  She’d slammed the door down but good, and still he managed to penetrate if she wasn’t completely vigilant.

  And now she was thinking of cracking open that door?

  She looked over at Harrison again. He was raring to go, ready to contact Justice through Laura, find out where he was, and go after him. Was that the way to handle this? Would she help capture him again, or would playing a game of cat and mouse only do worse harm?

  As she watched, Harrison ran his hands through his hair, much as she just had, but then he pulled on the longish strands at his nape. His gaze was glued to the words on the laptop, but she sensed his sideways interest. It was a kind of radar reserved for people who knew each other well. She’d seen it in people in love. Had experienced it a bit with Byron, though he’d been one of those people hard to understand at any real level. It was a silent communication that spoke volumes. Harrison was tuned in to her, but she was currently shuttered, powered down.

  She was afraid.

  “Wanna talk about the Colony?” he asked casually, his gaze still on his laptop.

  “No.” She’d already told him more than she’d intended.

  “Maybe some of the past history, long before you and your sisters?”

  “There’s a book with the Deception Bay Historical Society that lists my ancestors,” she told him. “It was written by a doctor who attended us when we were younger, I think, and Catherine considers it a violation of ethics and our privacy.”

  “She might be right. Where’s this doctor?”

  “Dead. Fell off the jetty into the Pacific a long time ago.”

  “Is that so? You know, a lot of people associated with the Colony wind up dead.”

  “Every living thing dies, eventually, Harrison,” she said.

  “I know. But some of the people at Siren Song seem to have died before their time.” He set the laptop aside and looked up at her as she stood near the sink. “Take Mary, your mother, for example. I found no record of her, no birth or death certificates. Kinda odd, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore,” she admitted. And that was true. No matter how hard she tried to gain some “normalcy” in her life, it never happened. Her youth had been centered at the lodge, and yeah, the people within, her relatives, were strange by anyone’s standards. She’d escaped and gone on to nursing school, but even there she had been isolated, hadn’t made many friends, and then there had been Byron . . . and now she was pregnant by a man from whom she was divorced. “A lot of what goes on at the lodge is ‘odd,’” she said, making finger quotes.

  “So, you’re telling me I should look up this book if I want to know about your family?”

  “It’s like a family tree, I understand.” She thought a moment, then added, “I just worry that something might end up in print that I never meant to broadcast. If you check the history, that’s all available information. I don’t want my family to think I’m a traitor.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said seriously, his gaze touching hers through the wire-rimmed glasses he wore while working on the computer. Oh, God, how she wanted to believe him, to trust him, but he really didn’t understand about Justice’s sense of injustice, his need for revenge, how deep the seeds of evil had been planted in his heart.

  She licked her lips nervously and walked to the small pantry near the back door, to search for tea . . . to do something, anything to keep busy.

  “I told you I won’t write anything you don’t want me to.” He turned all the way around in the chair and looked at her with such honesty that she believed him. Sort of.

  “Thanks.”

  “Can you tell me a little more how Justice fits in, though?”

  She snagged a bag of herbal tea, something called Calm, and closed the cupboard door. “All I know is that Madeline Turnbull is a cousin to my aunt and mother. So Justice is some kind of distant cousin to me.”

  “But you’ve met him? He was part of your . . . clan?”

  She tried to roll back the years, the memories that for so long she’d kept at bay. “Yeah, I’ve met him. When I was a kid. He used to come to the lodge when he was younger, I think.” She found a cup and filled it with water.

  “You were how old then?”

  “Six, maybe?” In reality she wasn’t completely certain. There were secrets within secrets between Catherine and Mary, and Catherine never felt compelled to bring them to the light of day unless it was absolutely necessary, even to Laura and her sisters.

  “Around Justice’s age?”

  “I guess.” She placed the cup in the microwave and set the timer before hitting the START button. “You want some tea . . . or coffee or . . . ?”

  He shook his head, intent on his questions. “And your mom died when you were around ten?”

  “That’s what I said,” Laura said stiffly. He’d hit a nerve again. Because she just didn’t know, and really, she should. But the details around her mother’s death were hazy, and Laura was almost embarrassed that she knew so little.

  “And she’s buried in the graveyard on the property?”

  “I think I already told you that.”

  He took off his glasses and set them on the table. Lacing his fingers on the crown of his head, he looked over at her. “What happened to her? I mean, what killed her?”

  “Catherine said she died of a broken heart. I know that sounds . . . unreal.” The microwave bell dinged and she grabbed the cup, then dunked the tea bag into the steaming water.

  Harrison skewered her with a look. “What does that mean, exactly? ‘Died of a broken heart’? People say that all the time, but what does it really mean? She wasted away after being rejected by her lover?”

  Laura shrugged and shook her head. “I think there wasn’t any one particular cause. She just died.” She hesitated, stared at the darkening blossom of water from the bag, then added, “She had a number of lovers, apparently.”

  “You all have different fathers.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “It must have been before they closed and locked the gates.”

  “Not funny.”

  “A little funny,” he argued, one side of his mouth lifting. “I was just trying to lighten things up.”

  “Sure.”

  “Really. I’m sorry,” he said, but the glimmer in his eyes told her otherwise. “So, how many sisters do you have?”

  Back to business. Of course. “There are seven living at the lodge,” Laura admitted.

  “How much do you remember of your mother?”

  “Not much.” There were a few memories, of course. Mary smiling rarely at her daughter, even laughing on a rare occasion. She’d spent hours braiding her daughters’ hair, or looking wistfully in a mirror at her own image. Laura remembered Mary taking long walks, toward the sea, always alone, never letting any of her children tag after her. They’d followed, of course, and found her standing upon a cliff, staring down at the crashing waves far below. In those moments, she’d seemed lost to Laura and her sisters. As they stood under the canopy of shivering firs, rain plopping along the forest floor, Mary had seemed unconscious of the weather.

  She blinked, chasing away the blurry images and finding Harrison Frost sitting in her cozy, if worn little kitchen, staring up at her so intently, her heart kick-started. “It’s Catherine who’s forefront in my mind. She was the one who was with us. She might have been my aunt, but she was available . . . she was there . . . when my real mother wasn’t.”

  “Where was Mary?”

  “Oh, she was around.” Laura set the wet tea bag on a saucer near the faucet. “Just living her own life. I remember different men coming f
rom her wing of the house, where we weren’t allowed,” Laura admitted uncomfortably. “And then they stopped coming, and for a while we didn’t realize she was gone, until Catherine showed us the headstone.”

  Harrison got to his feet and leaned back against the table, his fingers curling over its edge. “That’s some story. It’s strangely fable-like.”

  “This is still off the record, right?” She blew across the hot, fragrant water.

  He lifted a hand of surrender. “Until you give me a signal, I’m just gathering information.”

  She wouldn’t meet his eyes, felt slightly panicky. She had set this in motion but still wanted to put on the brakes. She buried her nose in her teacup and took a long swallow of a blend of jasmine and spice, trying to calm herself. She was a jangle of nerves, as much from Harrison Frost as Justice. Maybe it was because her hormones were out of whack from the pregnancy, or maybe it was the race of adrenaline through her blood at the thought of Justice free and stalking her, but she found it difficult to stay calm. Despite the name of the damned tea.

  “Your mother named you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, Lorelei had an unfaithful lover and threw herself to her death into the Rhine River. Sailors were lured by her voice from the large rock where she drowned and to their own death. There is a real voice-like sound that spawned the fable, apparently, an auditory trick of nature around that area that’s been smothered now by the sounds of modern urbanization.”

  “You have a good memory,” she said.

  He smiled and threw a glance at the computer. “I have the Internet.” He pointed to the device sticking out from the side of his laptop; his wireless connection enabled him to pick up the Internet anywhere.

  “Ahh . . .”

  “Have you ever wanted to find out more? About your father, for instance?” he asked curiously.

  “Mostly I’ve tried to blank it all out. It’s always seemed . . . safer. I didn’t want to move back here at all. That was my ex’s idea.”

  “But now you’re divorced, and still you’ve stayed.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “And you’re not leaving, even though Justice is out there, because you want to help protect your family?” he guessed, having been around her enough, she supposed, to read her.