Disturbance

by Jan Burke

  “They haven’t found her car yet. I was thinking about driving around, looking for the car. If he’s in it—”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “No,” he said, defeated. “No. But—moths. Why moths?”

  From the moment Lydia had told me about the decorations on Marilyn Foster’s body, my thoughts had gone to the warning on the Moths’ blog. Had this woman been killed as a warning to me? The idea that the Moths might go to that extreme horrified me.

  I thought of Marilyn’s ex-boyfriend in prison—someone who was LWOP, as was Parrish. Like me, Marilyn had dark hair and blue eyes—Parrish was known to choose victims with those features. And there was that weird business with the garden hose.

  But Parrish was in prison. There was no doubt about that. And the Moths on the blog had always seemed more likely to bluster than to act. Surely they knew that if they started committing murders, computer forensics experts would track them down.

  I had no real evidence, though, and wondered if I was making connections based on my own fears. I was sleep-deprived and stressed nearly to my limit, in no shape to see things clearly.

  So when Dwayne Foster asked me about moths, I didn’t give him the answer that seemed likely to me, but he didn’t seem to need one. The question was just part of that emotional pinball game playing in his mind.

  “I can’t help but think about … about what he did to her. Why? Why her? She was so sweet. She never did anything to anyone.” He took a big, gulping breath, let it out on a sob.

  “Tell me more about her. Tell me how you met,” I said.

  It worked. For a few minutes, he focused on something other than the last day of Marilyn’s life. His brother arrived, and we ended the call.

  My phone rang again almost as soon as I hung up.

  “Irene? Ethan. I’m with Reed and Vince,” he said, naming two homicide detectives with the LPPD. “I told them about the hose. They want to know if you’ll meet them at your house in about an hour.”

  “I’ve got a rewrite, and you’ve got my car, remember?”

  I heard him talking to them.

  “Reed says, when we’re both done for the day at the paper, give him a call and he’ll meet us.”

  All of that seemed as if it might work out just fine. Ethan and I had turned in our stories. Reed and Vince were following us back to my house from the paper. But then, just before I turned down my street, I saw something that made me slam on my brakes and nearly get rear-ended by the unmarked car behind me.

  Marilyn Foster’s blue Chevy Malibu was parked in the space that had been empty the night before.

  EIGHT

  I got out of my car, but before I had taken three steps forward, Reed ran up to me and grabbed hold of my shoulders. “Wait,” he said as Vince hurried past, using a radio to call for a crime scene unit and a couple of units for traffic control.

  I was semicoherently telling Reed that the space had been empty the night before, that the dogs had led us to it. He was getting similar information at the same time from Ethan, who had also rushed to my side. Vince put gloves on and was reaching for the trunk button when I screamed, “Vince, no!”

  He looked back at me, puzzled.

  “He’s used explosives in the past,” I said, hearing shakiness in my voice.

  “Who?”

  “Nick Parrish!”

  The three men exchanged glances. “Nick Parrish is in prison,” Reed said, in the sort of quiet, patient tone one reserves for three-year-olds frightened by thunder.

  But I was cringing, because Vince was pushing in that trunk button. It snicked softly, and the trunk lid came up. No explosions.

  “Oh, Christ—” Vince said, and Ethan, Reed, and I moved closer.

  At first glance it appeared to be a woman cloaked in a colorful blanket. Except there wasn’t a blanket, just her softly rounded nude body, wrapped in thin, clear plastic, and the skin beneath that plastic was covered with moths.

  Artistically drawn moths, colorful, and richly detailed, but with a fanciful quality—if real moths exist in matching designs, I’ve never seen one locally. If not for the chosen canvas, I might have thought them beautiful.

  Her straight blond hair was pulled back into a short pony-tail. Because of the moths and the plastic wrap, I could not see much of her face, but judging by her hands, which were not painted, I guessed her to be a young woman. Her eyes were closed.

  Vince reached in and touched her with a gloved finger, then drew his hand back suddenly. “Jesus! She’s frozen!”

  Someone honked a horn, and Vince quickly shut the trunk. Our cars were blocking traffic. I saw a martial light come into his eye as he walked back toward the horn honker, badge coming out of his pocket.

  I looked back at the closed trunk. “Parrish did that, too. Froze some of his victims.”

  “Don’t touch anything,” Reed warned me, quite unnecessarily. If he hadn’t been holding on to me, I think I would have run home. Maybe something in my body communicated that to him, because he asked Ethan to drive me home and wait for them there.

  “I can drive,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Ethan drives. Both of you, wait outside the house. Before you go in, I want to make sure you don’t have any visitors.”

  We had just pulled in the driveway when my cell phone rang. I recognized Frank’s number.

  “Irene?” I could hear the worry in the way he said my name. Jumping to a conclusion, I was ready to kill Ethan for calling him, but then Frank said, “I just heard the news on the radio. Are you okay?”

  For a wild moment, I wondered if the events of thirty seconds ago were already being broadcast. “What news?”

  “You. The press conference.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that.”

  “I didn’t think it would air outside the local area.”

  “You sounded shaken. And you sound shaken now. What’s going on?”

  I ignored an impulse to gloss over events until he got home. I’d have too much explaining to do. And since he’d heard the press conference, trying to hide my feelings from him was an equally bad idea.

  “I’m not really doing so well, to be honest, but Ethan and Ben have stayed with me, and now Reed and Vince are here. Kind of. They won’t let me go in the house, but Ethan’s waiting with me. Vince and Reed are at the end of our street, looking at a frozen body in the trunk of a car. She has moths painted on her. Or maybe inked.”

  There was a silence, then he said, “What?”

  I didn’t blame him. It wasn’t exactly a clear explanation. So I started over, with the story of the call from Aaron, then went on to the stories of the garden hose, Marilyn Foster, and finding the car. Although I hit a couple of rough patches in the telling, on the whole, talking to him about it calmed me down. I suspect it had the opposite effect on him, but he said, “I’m going to get home as fast as I can.”

  “More important to me that you get here safely.”

  “We’re still a couple of hours away from Las Piernas. God, I’m so sorry I haven’t been there with you, Irene.”

  “Just tell me you and Jack and the dogs had a good time.”

  “We did, but—”

  “But nothing. I’m going to be so glad to see you.”

  “Me you, too. Let me talk to Ethan.”

  I handed the phone over. Ethan listened for a minute, then said, “Of course I’m staying here until you come home. Ben will be here any minute now—I texted him while Irene was talking to you.” He glanced at me, then away. He added in a too casual voice, “Give Vince and Reed a call, will you? … Not yet, but you know how they can be…. We’ll be okay. See you soon.”

  He handed the phone back. Frank repeated that he’d see me soon, told me to call him if I needed to talk again between now and when he got home. He told me he loved me, and I said the same back, not caring who overheard us.

  I hung up and turned to Ethan. “I should have known he’d find out, but—thanks for
not tipping him off before now.”

  He shrugged. “I was tempted, but I figured it was your decision to make.”

  I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. It didn’t help. “I need to wait outside the car.”

  “Claustrophobia kicking in?” he asked, as we opened the doors.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m calling the paper,” Ethan told me.

  I nodded, even as I wondered what the hell was happening to me that I hadn’t thought of that on my own.

  After Ethan had talked to him for a while, John asked to talk to me. I told him what little I knew, which was no more than what Ethan had given him.

  “I have to go,” John said suddenly. “Wrigley wants me at the board meeting. Tell Ethan to get something to me before deadline.” He ended the call before I could ask him what, if anything, he wanted me to write up.

  I paced on the front lawn, watching as half a dozen patrol cars and a crime scene mobile unit pulled up at the end of a street.

  “Wonder if Wrigley’s going to hold another press conference,” Ethan said, clearly trying to distract me. “He was in his glory this afternoon.”

  The comment made me halt my pacing and stare at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Wrigley’s up to something.”

  “Isn’t he always?”

  “He’s asked John to come to a board meeting.”

  “That’s happening a lot lately. You know how things are. Probably means more layoffs, which means I’m about to lose my job.”

  “You don’t sound too broken up about it.”

  He looked away, and in that moment I realized how wrong I was. When he looked back at me, he said, “Aren’t you in the same place? I mean, the threat hangs over you long enough, you half wish it would happen just to get it over with.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of hope, but—I don’t know. Right now, I’m just trying to figure out Wrigley. He’s never invited other media into the building. Even when newsworthy events happened in the building itself. Did you see who he was hanging out with after the show?”

  “The show, is it? Well, I guess it was. No. I was too interested in making sure you got out of there without being buttonholed.”

  Two of the patrol cars headed down toward the house, and minutes later, a couple of uniformed officers went into my backyard. A police helicopter began hovering overhead.

  I didn’t believe for a moment that the killer was lounging around the neighborhood, let alone inside my house. But I kept thinking of Nick Parrish’s love of concealed traps and decided to let Vince and Reed and the uniforms clear the house. They did this quickly, and the patrol cars and the uniforms drove off. Reed stayed behind and asked me more questions about the time of night I first heard the water running, and other details, but it was hard to see how my answers could be of help. He thanked me, though, and hurried off to join Vince. Before long, the helicopter left as well. Fortunately, when the media helicopters arrived, they were focused on the activity near Marilyn Foster’s car.

  Ben texted Ethan that he had been asked to help the coroner’s office but would join us as soon as he could.

  I paced again. Ethan, who had taken out his laptop and started to write the story, suddenly halted, looked up at me, and said, “The universe is expanding.”

  “What?”

  “I just thought I’d let you know. Saw that on a science program. A show about Einstein and Hubble and a bunch of those guys. The Big Bang theory. There was this British scientist named Hoyle, and in the program—believe it or not, on this show, they actually used the phrase ‘according to Hoyle.’”

  From this I understood he was making a determined effort to amuse me. He proceeded to give a recap that had a few black holes of missing information in it, but his retelling kept me distracted and probably more entertained than the original show would have. When he finally ran down, he said, “I just try to keep that in mind, you know. When things get shitty with work and all. There are bigger things than the Las Piernas News Express. Than assholes who try to bother you with garden hoses. And bigger than even—” He broke off and shook his head. “Well, no, I don’t want to make it sound as if I don’t care about those women, or as if I don’t understand why you’re scared.”

  “Bigger even than Nick Parrish and his minions,” I said. “You’re right, Ethan. Letting myself become obsessed with him plays it just the way he wants it. I’ve got to keep perspective, not give him the attention he wants.”

  That resolve would have been easier to maintain if Parrish and his friends had stayed a galaxy away.

  NINE

  In later years, Quinn Moore wondered if his mother would have told him the truth about his birth father if she had not been on drugs.

  They were perfectly legal drugs, taken for pain. She was dying. Though he was fairly sure that dying in and of itself would not have been enough of an incentive to tell him the story. She began by saying that Harold Moore, the man who had divorced her when Quinn was ten, was not his father. In her confusion, she had forgotten that he already knew Harold Moore was his adoptive and not his birth father. Had her mind not been wandering between past and present, she might have recalled that the matter of his adoption was public by the time he was eighteen.

  She wasn’t aware that Quinn had actually learned he was adopted two years before that. He had learned it, of all places, at a shopping mall. By chance he had encountered Harold Moore there, while Moore was out shopping with his timid second wife. Quinn, given twenty bucks by his mother’s latest boyfriend—who was very far from the worst of the men she had brought into his life—and told to stay out of the house for a while, had been deciding between going to see a movie and visiting an arcade when he saw the approach of the couple and the look of surprised recognition on Harold’s face.

  His memories of Harold were mostly of coldness and cruelty, but he gave a half wave and said, “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hi, Dad?” Harold said. He turned to his wife and announced to her that Quinn was not his son, that he had been tricked into adopting him, and that Quinn was a bastard.

  “I’ve never heard better news in my life,” Quinn said.

  Harold turned away, red-faced, then spun back around and sucker-punched him, knocking Quinn flat. Unfortunately for Harold, he did so within plain sight of a pair of mall security guards. He was arrested for assault. Although the D.A. ultimately decided not to pursue charges, during the brief time he was in custody, Harold’s second wife took advantage of this opportunity and left him.

  Quinn did not tell his mother the truth about his bruised face or what Harold had said to him. He told her he had been mugged. He had been bruised before, and suffered far worse than a blow to the face, but something about that public punch and disowning awoke a long-simmering rage in Quinn Moore.

  Quinn’s mother chose to believe the story of the mugging, which was easy for someone with a long-standing habit of pretending not to see the truth. She told herself that the mugging was why he took up strength training and self-defense. She was disapproving but not surprised when she learned he had bought a gun.

  She probably didn’t know that he never practiced enough to fire it with real accuracy. She also failed to realize that he had developed a penchant for reading about poisons and household accidents and other ways a person might die before his time.

  He searched in vain through her papers and belongings for a reference to someone named Quinn, deciding that he must have been named for his real father.

  About two years after the mall incident, Harold Moore tried to reunite with his first wife, Quinn’s mother. By then Quinn was no longer living at home—he was attending Las Piernas University. He had started out as an art student, as his mother had once been, but had changed his major to business.

  When his mother told him of Harold’s renewed courtship, Quinn could see that she was flattered by Harold’s attention. The man had made a fortune in commercial real estate, and a prenup and excellent attorn
eys had ensured that the runaway second wife had received only a minuscule portion of Harold’s wealth.

  Harold believed Quinn’s mother was the only person who had cared about him when he was poor and struggling, or so he said. Quinn thought that this was probably true. Harold also told her that was the reason he wanted her back in his life. Quinn didn’t care whether or not that was true.

  Quinn had supposed that his mother would be disappointed when Harold did not keep the date they made one Friday night, but while she may have been a little hurt by it, she didn’t seem to be crushed, or to think it was out of character. Quinn was angry with her for even accepting the date, but he didn’t show her that anger. Women were stupid creatures, after all. Whores at heart. She certainly never knew how to say no to a man.

  When Harold didn’t show up for work the next Monday, inquiries ultimately led police to check on his home. Harold’s car was in the garage.

  As police entered Harold’s house, they found his car keys, wallet, and cell phone on the kitchen counter. He was not in any of the rooms of the home, or in the backyard. They began to look for indications of whether he had left his home voluntarily. Moore’s toothbrush, razor, and other personal care items were in the bathroom. His empty suitcase was in a spare closet. Yet there were no signs of a struggle or forced entry.

  These and other indicators made police question his few friends and family members, including his ex-wife and adopted son. None of these people were able to provide any information that resulted in solid leads.

  Further investigation showed that Harold had last used the phone and one of his credit cards on the previous Thursday, the last day anyone had seen him.

  Harold Moore had vanished.

  The story ran for a day or two in the local news, then all public concern about him seemed to vanish as well.

  Police quickly learned that Harold Moore reserved what little charm he possessed for business relationships. Most who dealt with him in real estate transactions knew him only for his ability to negotiate deals and for his knowledge of the local market—and a kind of ruthlessness. He was a workaholic who spared no time for friends.