by Jan Burke
Quinn and Donovan were back in Las Piernas now. Thinking of Las Piernas made him think of Irene Kelly.
He thought of Ben Sheridan, too, but while he was angry with Sheridan, the man didn’t excite him in the way Kelly did. He could torture her through whatever he did to Sheridan, of course. That bitch would be driven crazy by the mere thought of harm being done to him. Which was, of course, what she deserved.
Irene Kelly was the reason he had been imprisoned. She had nearly killed him to do it. He thought of the long, hard road back from paralysis, and just how he would exact revenge on her for that.
Lying helpless for months, struggling so hard for every tiny victory over his nerves and muscles. Then the surgery, which only led to being transferred from the hospital. The experience of being held against his will—first by his own body, then within the prison hospital, and even during his brief stay in prison—had reminded him of childhood experiences, brought up a wellspring of hatred so strong in him, it had fueled his determination.
He knew exactly who to thank for his years of suffering:
Irene Kelly.
TWENTY-ONE
Persistent rumors were circulating in Las Piernas.
One was that Nicholas Parrish had been seen in town. Plenty of those reports came in during the first few days after his escape, but they tapered off after that. Every now and then, though, there was a spike in the number of calls to the task force that was trying to find him. Aloud, I blamed his fan club for the upswing in sightings—the Moths’ blog got more traffic whenever they claimed contact with him. Inwardly, I felt as frightened as any of the more hysterical 911 callers.
Another rumor was that the Express was coming back under new ownership. That was a little like being told your good friend Lazarus was up and walking around again. It didn’t seem to fit with what one knew about the condition in which he was last seen.
One night, not long after Parrish’s escape, I was home alone—if you don’t count two plainclothes detectives keeping the house under surveillance from an unmarked car parked nearby. I was wondering what I’d do if someone actually managed to revive the Express when I heard Frank’s car pull in the driveway. The dogs were at the door and waiting to greet him, but even before he got past them to pull me into an embrace, I knew he had news.
Frank and I have had to hammer out our own set of rules about our workplaces over the years. Essentially, home is home, and conversations there do not go back to our places of employment. So when he told me he wanted to tell me something but needed our conversation to remain private, I didn’t hesitate to agree.
Still holding on to me, he said, “We know who the frozen woman is.”
I felt myself tense. “The one who was in the trunk of Marilyn Foster’s car?”
“Yes. Her name is Lisa King. She was from Nevada.”
Lisa King. I said it to myself several times. The real progress in most homicide cases usually begins at the identification of the victim. Most. I thought of Cade Morrissey and Marilyn Foster, named for all these weeks. I thought of Lisa King and wondered if she, too, was somehow related to Nick Parrish. “How old was she?”
“Somewhere between nineteen and twenty-three.” He said it in a distracted way, while studying my face. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, although I was a little shaky. “Yes, but let’s sit down.”
We moved to the couch.
“So,” I said, once we were seated, “knowing her name should help you find her killer, right?”
“Maybe. We’ll try, but I don’t know if we’ll get anywhere, even with the ID.”
“Tell me about her anyway. Why do you only have an age range if you learned who she is? And how did you find out?”
“She was nineteen when her family last had contact with her. She might have been older when she was murdered, though, because they haven’t heard from her in four years. So if she was murdered soon after she went missing, then frozen for all this time, she was nineteen. But if she was murdered more recently, she could have been as old as twenty-three. We’re working on narrowing that down, and having a name will help us do that. As for how we learned about her, we caught a break from NamUs.”
You live with a cop, you learn acronyms. But this one I knew from writing about missing persons. NamUs offered the best hope for putting names to unidentified dead that had come along in years. It’s a national database designed so that any individuals can enter information about their missing family members and search for matches, and also submit DNA samples without cost.
“So who was trying to find her?”
“Her sister. Peyton King. She’s three years older than Lisa.”
I felt my brows go up. “Not the parents?”
“Father’s dead, but the stepfather and mother had not reported her missing.”
“What? Her own mother didn’t wonder where her daughter was?”
“No, apparently there was a falling-out. Reed went to Nevada to make the notification and see what the locals could tell us—and he said everybody in the family seemed genuinely shocked by the news, and guilt-ridden. He remains suspicious about the stepfather, but not for the murder.”
“Suspicious—why?”
He shrugged. “No proof of anything, just a possibility of some kind of abuse. But it might just as easily be what the step-dad said it was—Lisa felt that her mother’s marriage to him was a betrayal of her father’s memory and never let go of her anger about that. Whatever the case, as a teenager, Lisa King had a history of running away from home.”
“Did her sister—Peyton? Did she have any theories?”
“Not that she was willing to discuss with us. She said that Lisa was ‘just a free spirit.’” He shrugged. “Again, some people are.”
“Some,” I agreed, “but if you get them to stop singing ‘Free Bird’ for a few minutes, you find out there’s often more to it.”
“Exactly,” he said, then fell silent.
“Sorry,” I said. “She’s—I didn’t mean to be flip—she can’t tell us her story.”
“We’ll make sure it gets told.”
Seeing the determined look on his face, I felt utterly confident that he would. “So tell me the rest of what you know of that story so far.”
He told me that Lisa King had settled down long enough to get a high school diploma but, soon after graduation, started roving again. During the first year she was gone, she called Peyton every few weeks. Lisa also sent pictures taken of herself here and there. In most she was grinning, smoking a cigarette, holding a drink, and shown partying with people she had chanced to meet along the way. She never named those in the photos.
Every now and then she’d give Peyton a cell phone number, and Peyton would call her, too, but most of the time Lisa didn’t carry one with her. The calls came less often in the second year, and in the spring of that year, on Peyton’s birthday, they had an argument.
“April twenty-sixth,” Frank said. “The last time she heard from her. Lisa was in California, but one of the reasons they argued was that she wouldn’t be more specific than that. She was acting coy. Peyton lost patience with it, hung up on her.”
“So now she’s on guilt overload?”
“Yes, even before we showed up. The news we had didn’t help, of course, but we tried to let her see that if she hadn’t entered the information on NamUs, she never would have had even this much resolution.”
“So what’s next?”
“We’re working with the local authorities to get a look at the phone records, so that we can at least try to figure out where Lisa called from.”
Within twenty-four hours, most of what Frank had told me was public knowledge. The police were actively seeking the public’s help at that point. Lisa King’s last call was placed in Las Piernas, from a phone booth outside a liquor store. The owner of the liquor store didn’t remember her, wasn’t even sure he still had records showing who had worked in his store that night, and security camera recordings from that date were lon
g gone. Peyton had supplied some of the photos that were now being shown on the evening news—and that Ethan had up on the station’s Web site—so I got a chance to replace the single image of Lisa King I had been carrying around in my head. Now I knew what Lisa looked like thawed, clothed, and unpainted.
At least, not painted with moths. She was about five feet four, slender but curvy. She had large, light green eyes and favored heavy use of eyeliner. Her look wasn’t goth, though—it was almost Garbo. In nearly every photo, she wore a dark gray cloche hat. It looked good on her—she had a pretty face, a straight little nose, and full lips. She wore a silver cross on a delicate chain around her neck. A silver filigree cuff bracelet was the only other jewelry visible in any of the photos. In most of them, she wore short-sleeve, long, draping tops and dark jeans, and carried a large, cloth shoulder bag that I suspected doubled as a suitcase.
Phone calls started coming in. The hat had made her memorable, and the photos jogged memories. She was a fixture on the local party scene. She had a knack for finding someone who would give her a place to stay for a few days. None of the people she had stayed with—not all of whom volunteered that information themselves—had seen her after the date of the phone call.
Police used the information from the more reliable reports to conclude that it was likely she either met her killer not long after the call or perhaps already knew him by then. They began canvassing the neighborhood near the liquor store.
Two additional “boyfriends” were located, but both of them were college students who had been home for the summer. Neither had been in Las Piernas in the weeks before Lisa disappeared, and she had been seen alive after they had returned to school.
At that point, the investigation seemed to hit a dead end. Police followed up on any information that came their way, but none of it led them any closer to her killer.
Efforts to find Parrish and those who’d helped him escape were also ongoing but didn’t meet with any greater success.
I started seeing my therapist again, visits that at first kept me from going completely around the bend and eventually helped me calm down enough to sleep through most nights. She reminded me that Parrish was not Godzilla, and even when I replied that no, indeed, Godzilla was a much nicer monster, she helped me to stop supersizing Parrish and his power in my imagination.
She also reminded me to consider my own power, and the changes I had made since my last encounter with Parrish, including regular lessons and practice with Rachel in self-defense.
Life, as it goes on, always provides variety, and that alone kept me from living in a permanent funk. The days, after all, weren’t unrelentingly grim. Guy and Lydia’s wedding gave me a chance to celebrate their happiness, and if the presence of two of Parrish’s most likely targets meant a visible police presence as well, the occasion lost none of its joy as a result.
I was enjoying my new job as well, finding that the challenges in changing from print to radio reporting were more than a distraction from my fears, and stimulating. If it was a little strange to be mentored in this by Ethan, whom I had mentored at the Express, it wasn’t the cause of any resentment. I appreciated his willingness to teach me the ropes.
Harder not to resent the fact that I once again had a team of babysitters—a set of bodyguards that rotated between Frank, our neighbor Jack, Rachel, and if none of them were available, one of Frank’s off-duty friends from the department. Working out a way to be an effective journalist under these conditions was a more difficult challenge.
My feelings about the protection were, to say the least, mixed. I could easily admit I felt safer knowing that someone was watching my back. But Ethan and Lydia were quite obviously assigning me to stories on the political scene that would kept me in public places or on the phone. I couldn’t work the way I usually did, and I wasn’t willing to expose the sources I had in city hall to police scrutiny—even from off-duty, friendly officers who probably couldn’t have cared less about politics.
And eventually, there was the problem of a lack of solitude. I first began to feel my longing for it on the beach. I liked my runs on the beach with my dogs. Alone. Having Frank along or a friend was fine, but not every day, not every time. For the first two or three weeks after Parrish escaped, I was scared even when someone was with me. After that, I began to chafe at the bit.
It wasn’t just on runs, of course. I began to feel as if I were a bug in a jar. I started to notice avoidance behavior on my part—I canceled dinners with friends, begged off when invited on outings. I slept more, found reasons to linger anywhere I might be able to be alone. At home, instead of talking to my minders, who were, in fact, close friends, I pretended to get lost in working on the computer or moved to other rooms and shut the door.
In public, I didn’t have that option, and I realized how pathetic this longing for privacy had become when I noticed that I now looked forward to trips to the restroom and dawdled there.
I found some sympathy from Ben, although his work was so different from mine—he seldom traveled alone or made appointments to meet with complete (and often hostile) strangers. Still, he didn’t like being constantly accompanied any more than I did. That said, we were both aware of the bull’s-eyes on our backs, so there was a limit to our complaints.
As the first month went by, I could see the task of watching over me wearing on those who had taken it on, even if they wouldn’t admit it to me. By the end of the second month, little gaps were appearing in the schedule. By the autumn, I was just being warned to be careful.
I was, for all the good that did me.
One afternoon in late September, I was talking to Ethan in my small, shared office, waiting for Ben to show up for lunch with us, when the receptionist buzzed my desk and told me I had a pair of visitors in the lobby.
“Who?” Ethan said over the speaker, before I could ask.
I shot him a frown as the receptionist answered—in much warmer tones—that it was a man named Josh Enwill, who was here with his wife, Andrea.
Ethan raised his brows in inquiry. I was pondering two questions almost simultaneously:
Is Ethan stupid enough to be fooling around with the receptionist?
and
Where have I heard the name Josh Enwill before?
The answer to the second question came to me at the same time it occurred to Ethan: the injured prison guard.
“Escort them to the conference room, please,” he said, in a businesslike way that still left me undecided about the first question.
TWENTY-TWO
The conference room was closer to the lobby than my office was, but it took a while for the Enwills to make the short trip. He was walking with a cane, making determined progress, his right side seeming to drag the left half of his body along with it. The counterpoint to this slouched figure was Andrea Enwill, a tall blonde who walked behind him carrying a canvas backpack, her chin up, spine straight. She silently willed him down the hall with a nearly tangible force.
Ethan and I shook hands with them, then Ethan pulled out a chair for Josh but didn’t offer other assistance. He looked at Ethan for a moment, then said, with painstaking care but only slightly slurring his words, “Are you the one who got hurt, up in the mountains?”
“No,” Ethan and Andrea said at the same time.
“I think you mean Ben Sheridan,” I said.
“Oh, yes, of course,” he said, ducking his head.
“We’ll go over there next,” Andrea assured him.
“As it happens,” I said, “he’s on his way here. He’s meeting us for lunch.”
Josh looked up at that. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“If you don’t mind,” Andrea said, “could we wait for him? If it won’t ruin your plans?”
“No problem,” I said.
Ethan offered beverages to each of us, then stepped out to fetch them. I could see the Enwills were ill-at-ease, so I asked them if it was their first visit to Las Piernas. Yes, their first time here. Th
ey had driven down from Bakersfield, where they had moved after Josh left the Department of Corrections. There was a world of hurt lurking behind those last few words, so I quickly mentioned that I used to live in Bakersfield and worked for the Californian, and that most of Frank’s family lived there. So we made Bakersfield small talk and they relaxed a bit. Ethan came back with the drinks—and Ben in tow.
After the next round of introductions, Andrea reached into the backpack and pulled out a notebook and a manila folder. She kept the folder, but she opened the notebook to a page with writing on it and handed it to Josh.
He positioned it with his right hand, and studied it for a moment. He looked up and said, “Excuse me. Since—since I was hurt, I have …”
He looked helplessly at Andrea.
“Short-term memory loss,” she said.
He stared at her for a moment, then laughed. “As demonstrated!”
She smiled at him. The tension in the room went down another few notches.
“Right.” He looked at the notebook again, then said, “I came to Las Piernas for three reasons. Andrea has a sister here who has been wanting us to visit. I wanted to talk to the police here. And I wanted to see Ms. Kelly and Dr. Sheridan.”
“Irene and Ben,” I said, and Ben nodded.
He wrote our names in the margins of the notebook, then said, “Okay. Irene and Ben, I want to apologize.”
“Apologize?” I said. “For what?”
“I let him get away.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Irene is right,” Ben said, “neither of us blames you for his escape.”