Mira had no idea what will meant, but she’d gotten the gist of it. With Nadine’s guidance, she’d put herself in an altered state and had done what she was doing now, shut down the sensation to a particular part of her body. Within half an hour, she had learned one of the most essential lessons in her long and complex apprenticeship with her grandmother.
The will controls the brain.
That same energy can be turned outward. This last truth hadn’t come from Nadine. Who had said it?
When she could no longer feel her fingers or joints, when it seemed that her hand no longer existed, she twisted her wrist in a certain way and dislocated it. She felt discomfort but no pain. In seconds she was able to manipulate her hand free of the cuff. She twisted her wrist again and heard the soft pop as the joint snapped back into place.
She lay there, completely spent, her body drenched in sweat. Then the pain assaulted her, a screaming banshee that drove hot nails into her bones and nerve endings. Her entire arm felt as though it were consumed in flames. Mira gasped and struggled to maintain her altered state.
Will controls brain, will controls brain, will...
Mira visualized her arm encased in ice, killing the fire.
The final vestige of pain left her and she raised her arm and opened her arms and flexed her wrist. The skin around it was bright red, that was all. She sat forward, away from the wall, and got up from the bed. Her legs felt shaky, her thigh ached and burned. She went over to the window and pushed the blinds to the side. Tall, skinny pines. Florida pines? No telling. The land looked hilly, but not flat, the road was narrow, she didn’t see any buildings or other cars. The sky was heavily overcast, the color of lead.
Mira raised the blind. The window was an old-fashioned jalousie that had to be cranked open. The lever had been removed. Even if she could get the jalousies open, she wouldn’t be able to escape through the glass slats. She looked up at the ceiling, but didn’t see an escape hatch.
Two doors. She opened the first. A closet, a few clothes hanging inside. She grabbed a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, shrugged off Nick’s jacket and tore off the long T-shirt she’d been wearing for what seemed like years, and put on the new clothes. The jeans fit her in the waist, but were too long. She rolled up the cuffs and eyed the pairs of shoes hooked onto a shoe rack. Sneakers, high tops, scuffed loafers. Wacko’s shoes? She crouched and brought her hands to the sneakers. Nothing came to mind, no impression, no nudges. Definitely Wacko’s shoes.
Mira sat at the edge of the bed to put them on. Her feet were a mess, scraped and bruised and swollen, and she eased them into the sneakers. They felt tender when she stood, but at least she could run in sneakers. She put Nick’s jacket back on, brought out the Swiss Army knife. She selected the longest blade, prayed that she wouldn’t have to use it on Wacko, and went over to the bedroom door. She turned the knob and opened it.
A new prison, she thought, and made her way out into the rest of the trailer. The first thing she did was turn the dead bolt in the front door, unlocking it. But it apparently was locked from the outside—with what? A padlock? Well, two could play that game. She put on the chain. If Wacko stopped in the next few minutes, the chained door would give Mira a little time.
Mira used the bathroom, washed her face, and returned to the main part of the trailer. The fridge was on, but appeared to run off a battery or gas rather than electricity. It was well stocked with bottled water, fruit, hard-boiled eggs, juices, small containers of fruit yogurt. She ate standing up, vigilant for any change in the trailer’s speed, any turns, rises, or dips in the road. She went over to the dinette table and peered out the blind that covered this window.
She caught sight of a green road sign, but the trailer was moving too fast for her to read it. The land definitely looked like northern Florida, but the area was rural. Not good. Except for Jacksonville on the east coast and Tallahassee to the west, northern Florida was a wasteland. Farther south and inland lay Gainesville, then Orlando, and Ocala, but she sensed they weren’t that far south.
Wacko eventually would have to stop for gas or to use the bathroom, right? But maybe she’d stopped hours ago.
If she could get the front door open, she could jump. But at this speed, she might break a leg or her foot or worse. As long as the trailer was moving, she was safe. Even Wacko couldn’t be in two places at once.
She brought out the cell phone again, turned it on. Searching for network. She turned the cell phone in another direction, but the message in the window didn’t change. Mira turned the phone off and unfolded all the blades in the knife, taking inventory of what she had that might be useful. A tiny screwdriver, a pair of scissors, a can opener, three blades of varying lengths and sharpness. She sat at the dinette and raised the blind partway and tried the screwdriver on one of the screws that held the window frame in place. If she could remove the goddamn frame, she could kick out the jalousies, and when the trailer slowed sufficiently, she could jump and run like hell.
The screw was badly corroded and refused to budge. She raised the blind higher and counted the screws that held the frame in place. Fifteen of the little suckers. She went to work on another screw and the trailer hurled on through the wasteland.
2
Tybee Island stood at the mouth of the Savannah River, about twenty feet above sea level. It was connected to the mainland by a series of bridges similar to those that connected the Florida Keys to the mainland, except these bridges crossed river and marsh instead of ocean. These vast salt marshes fell away on either side of Sheppard, broken up here and there by sagging wooden docks that led to homes hidden in the dense trees that lined the marsh.
Once Sheppard was actually on the island, he turned right at the first light, just as Mrs. Norcross had instructed, and immediately liked the looks of Campbell Street. It angled through the shadows of huge, towering live oaks draped in Spanish moss. The complex richness of the air spoke of ancient Southern traditions, of lives that unfolded with a kind of sweet predictability. It occurred to him that it was the ideal spot for a woman like Allie Hart. I’m ordinary, I live here among regular people, and you will never see what’s really buried in the darkness of my heart. Old wooden homes on stilts rose on either side of him, the kind of homes where people lived out their entire lives.
At 192 Campbell, he pulled into the curving driveway and stopped in front of the house. It was wooden, forty or fifty years old. A wooden fence enclosed the yard on either side. Two stories. The second level looked much newer than the rest of the place. It had a corrugated metal roof, like many of the newer homes in the Florida Keys, and large front windows. He didn’t see any sign advertising a security system. A place this old wouldn’t be difficult to break into and he didn’t intend to waste time getting a search warrant.
As he got out, he plucked his cell phone from the seat, pressed automatic dial again, but got the same message for Whitford’s phone number.
Sheppard hurried over to the wooden gate and let himself into the yard. No lawn, just native plants and several huge trees that kept the place in perpetual shade. He spotted a dock that jutted out about ten feet into the marsh, a fishing pole standing upright in a corner of it. It held two beach chairs with a small wooden table between them.
The gate behind him creaked and he glanced around. An old guy with thick white hair eyed Sheppard with extreme suspicion. A black-and-white cat wound between the old guy’s legs.
“Reckon you’re trespassing, my friend.”
His Southern accent immediately brought to mind grits and hotcakes sizzling on a griddle. “Reckon I’m not. Agent Sheppard, FBI.” He held up his badge. “And you are...?”
“Freddie Pringle. Live down the street. I keep an eye on the doc’s place, gather her mail, when she’s away.”
“Any idea where she went, Mr. Pringle?”
“The mountains. On vacation. She was here yesterday. Brought her dad over for a while. He don’t fish too good anymore, but he still seems to enjoy it.”
“Uh-huh. Fifteen years. One year she was married to her second husband, then they got divorced and she’s been here alone. Shame, her being such a good-lookin’ woman and all. She’s real good at what she does. People come into ER shot up, drugged up, messed up from the get-go and she fixes ‘em up. Hell, one night I’d had too many beers and did a job on my finger. She stitched it up jus’ fine.” He held out the index finger on his right hand. “Can’t see so much as a scar. And she never charged me a dime. She’s done that for folks up and down Campbell.”
Another glowing character reference, Sheppard thought. But it fit. Take care of the people among whom you lived and they would never speak ill of you. A perfect camouflage.
“She can fix bodies up just fine. But when something here at home breaks down, she calls me up like some helpless young thing and wants to know who she should call even though she can fix anything. Once, the pipes under my sink done broke and I had me one big flood. She happens by and fixed it. Jus’ rolled up her sleeves and got to it. Seen her do it with the AC, her car, the dock.... Don’t know why she hires anyone to fix anything.”
“What else do you do besides pick up her mail?”
“If something needs fixin’, I take care of it. Just keep an eye on the place, same thing I used to do for Bill and Lori.”
“How long has the family owned the place?”
“Well, I’ve been livin’ here for close to thirty years, when Campbell was jus’ a dirt road. The Currys used to come up here for holidays, summers, guess goin’ back nearly as long as I’ve been here.”
“I guess you knew her brothers.”
“Sure did. Ray, the smallest, never really got to know him too well ‘fore he drowned. Dean and Keith, knew them both right well. Dean was one real special kid. Never did believe that he killed someone with his car. He was always mowing my lawn for free, picking up stuff at the store for me, washing my car. Keith, well, him I didn’t care for so much. Selfish, seemed to me. There was one real pretty girl Dean hung out with for a summer. And doncha know, I’m over here one day last August, I think it was, and there she is, just sitting down on the dock. She remembered me. We had a nice long chat. I caught her up on all the Curry family news.”
“You remember her name?”
“Sure thing. Lia Phoenix. Her folks still live on the next street over, third house on the right. She told me she ran away from Tybee when she was fifteen or sixteen and that she lived in central Florida now. Has a kid and all.”
I’m Dean Curry’s alibi. But that’s for another day. Once again, this went so far beyond any synchronicity he’d ever experienced that it might take him the rest of his life to figure it all out.
“Where’s she live, do you know?”
He frowned, thinking about it. “Some odd town in Florida I’ve never heard of Cassanova? No, that wasn’t it”
“Cassadaga?”
He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that’s it.”
Interesting, Sheppard thought. Ian West had been from Cassadaga.
Pringle rubbed his unshaven jaw. “Just curious. Why’s the FBI poking around here?”
“Dr. Hart may have gotten herself into some trouble.”
“Aw, Lord, they’ve had more than their share of bad luck.”
“I was hoping to get inside the house and look for leads on her whereabouts, Mr. Pringle.”
He winked an eye shut. “Mind if I see that badge of yours again?”
Sheppard handed him the badge and Pringle examined it with the scrutiny of a bank teller looking for counterfeit twenties. “Reckon it’s legit. C’mon, we can go in the back.”
Pringle led the way onto a glassed-in porch, a kind of sunroom. Sheppard noticed the rattan furniture, the decorative concrete floor, and the profusion of small, green plants. “She’s a gardener?” he asked.
“Them’s herbs. She’s big into alternative medicines.” Pringle unlocked the double French doors.
Sheppard felt strange when he entered the house and stood there, listening to the silence, taking in the smell of the air, the colors and furniture, the texture of Allie Hart’s life. A solitary life. But at a glance, there was nothing here that indicated she was at the edge of madness or that she was one of the heirs of the Curry family fortune. The place was simply but expensively furnished in pine and rattan, with two bedrooms and a bathroom downstairs and another bedroom, bath, and computer room upstairs, with a balcony that overlooked the marsh. Comfortable, excessively tidy, everything in its place.
She liked art: The walls were covered with paintings, lithographs, sketches, pen-and-ink drawings. In the bedroom hung two paintings by an artist whose name Sheppard recognized—Edna Hibel, a Florida artist, now well into her eighties, whose mother-and-daughter images were favorites of both Nadine and Mira. In the downstairs bedroom, the walls were covered with framed family photos that included a number of Allie Hart, some of which looked recent.
Pringle, standing in the bedroom doorway, cleared his throat. “You stay as long as you need to, Agent Sheppard. Just lock up when you leave.”
“Before you leave, Mr. Pringle, tell me which of these photos looks like Dr. Hart now.”
The old man shuffled into the room and lifted one of the large poster-size collages off the wall. “This one right here.”
“Great. Thanks. I certainly appreciate all your help, Mr. Pringle.”
“Jus’ take your time,” he said, and let himself out.
Sheppard immediately removed the recent photo of Allie and imagined her with shorter reddish hair. He would email this photo to King, tell him about the different hairstyle, and within an hour, it would be on the Internet and in the offices of the Florida Highway Patrol. He pressed speed dial again. No change.
Sheppard climbed the stairs to the second floor. She had a fax, a scanner, the works. Keith Curry had advised him to search his sister’s computer. He booted up the Dell PC, set Hart’s photo in the scanner, and when the computer was ready, he went into the scanner program.
He put Hart’s photo into My Pictures, e-mailed them to King, and started scrolling through the dozens of thumbnail photographs. Halfway down the page, he stopped, leaned closer to the screen. “What the hell,” he murmured, and double-clicked the picture to enlarge it. Labeled SHEP 517, it showed him and Mira on the Tango boardwalk late last spring, he remembered the day. She had taken off a couple hours from the bookstore and they had gone out to lunch and shopping afterward. He clicked on another labeled M1RA 822 that showed Mira sweeping the walkway in front of the bookstore. The shadows against the walk indicated that it was late afternoon. He clicked through dozens of such photos—of him, Mira, Annie, Nadine, his home, Mira’s home, outside and inside the bookstore, even the front of the bureau’s Tango Key office. The photos dated back at least nine months and the most recent had been taken Christmas Day, when they were packing the car to leave for North Carolina.
Thanks to the Internet and the high-profile cases he had investigated over the years, he undoubtedly had been easy to find. And once she’d found him, she’d documented his life with the precision of a researcher. She had stalked and studied him and the people in his life, establishing his patterns, his affections, his vulnerabilities.
He kept scrolling through the photos and came across another set of thumbnails that looked intriguing. They were labeled BLANK1 through BLANK11. He enlarged each one, printed it out, then copied the entire picture file onto a CD and popped it into his laptop.
While the file was copying, he arranged the photos in the order he’d printed them. Everything in life, from DNA to cloud formations and weather, to crimes and habits and lifestyles, was composed of patterns and he sensed this was one such pattern. But of what? Fields, lakes, hills, roads, trees, ruined buildings. The pictures of the buildings had been taken at too great a distance to tell very much about them. The road didn’t include anything as convenient as a sign. And the nature shots—shit, they could have been t
aken anywhere.
He turned off her computer, removed the hard drive, gathered up all the backups, and stuck everything in his laptop case, except for the eleven pages of fields, trees, lakes, and buildings. The jigsaw. He clipped these pages together and left them on top of the laptop case to study in the car.
Sheppard used Hart’s phone and called Whitford’s cell number again. Same message. Subscriber out of range. He called King and told him he’d e-mailed Hart’s photo and that the art department should touch it up so that she had shorter, lighter hair.
“Curry and the woman should be landing in Savannah in about thirty minutes, Shep. Hart’s cell service is with Cingular. I’m still working on Whitford’s.”
Sheppard suddenly remembered that Mira’s cell phone was missing. “Alert T-Mobile as well and give them Mira’s cell number just in case Hart has that phone and uses it.”
“Got it. I’ll be in touch.”
The room began to feel excessively warm. He opened the doors to the balcony and stood in the cool breeze, gazing out over the marsh. The tide was moving in and the muddy flats he’d seen earlier were gradually filling with water. Way on the other side of the marsh, the docks that jutted out like thirsty tongues into the tall weeds seemed to shimmer and shine in the light.
Rhythm, he thought. The life that Allie Hart had created for herself here was all about rhythm—the wild, chaotic beat of ER counterbalanced by this strange and lovely cadence of nature. The water in the marsh rose and fell with the tides, the sun rose and set on Tybee beaches, and everything in her private life was cyclical, predictable, known. She had tried to plan the events of the last several days with the same sort of precision that she brought to her private life. That was what all the research and investigation had been about. Sheppard suspected that she hadn’t counted on killing five people and shooting Mira. So, right from the start, he thought, the unpredictable and chaotic had intruded. And keep in mind that when things don’t go according to plan, she gets rattled, Curry had told him. Right now, she’s probably extremely edgy and unpredictable.
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