by Jan Burke
I told them Ethan and I were from the radio station, and the older couples mentioned that they remembered me from the newspaper. We spent a little time mourning the passing of the Express and giving them information on the news programs on KCLP, of which they had been unaware. I told them that I was doing a piece about how search dogs worked but that I hadn’t chosen their street at random.
“In connection with another story I’m working on, we’re all a little concerned about Kai Loudon,” I began. “He lives on this street, right?”
The house—two doors down from where we were—was eagerly pointed out by the kids. The story of the accident on the stairs was soon told by the adults. “Violet was so mean to that kid, I’m amazed Kai takes such good care of her,” one of the women said. “I think I would have suffocated her years ago.”
Her husband chided her, but the other couple agreed with her.
“No,” the man insisted, “she’s not so bad. Loudon was the problem.”
“Kai’s father?” I asked.
“No, stepfather.” The man blushed. “I don’t think the father has ever been in the picture, if you know what I mean. Loudon was a—” He glanced at the boys, who were eagerly taking this all in. “Loudon was worthless. I think he would have been happy if Violet had pawned the kid off on relatives. Instead, Loudon ended up leaving them. Kai was eleven or twelve, I think.” He glanced at the boys, then said, “Kai seemed to have fewer ‘accidents’ after Loudon left, if you know what I mean.”
I would definitely have to talk to this guy when there weren’t any kids around to make him censor himself. “Has anyone seen Kai lately?” I asked.
The adults exchanged glances, then admitted they hadn’t seen him for quite some time. “But that’s not unusual,” one of the men said. “He keeps odd hours, doesn’t come out of the house much. The Loudons never have been neighborly.”
“He doesn’t come to the door right away if you knock,” the mother of the boys said. “But I’m sure if you keep trying, you’ll find him there. He can’t go far with her to care for.”
“No, Mom,” the older of the boys said. I judged him to be about ten. “He’s not there anymore.”
“Michael!” she said, reddening.
He folded his arms and jutted his chin out, and I could see he was nearly ready to bend double with the effort of not smarting off to her.
“Michael, what makes you say that?” I asked, crouching down to eye level.
“He moved out. I saw him.”
“Liar,” his younger brother accused.
This led to a brief chase and might have resulted in mayhem, but their mother grabbed hold of Michael before he could punish his accuser, who was ordered to return home immediately. He wisely, if reluctantly, obeyed.
She turned to Michael, still in hand. “And as for you—”
“I’m telling the truth!” he protested.
“I believe you,” I said, for which I received a grateful look. His mother sighed and let go of him.
“When did he move out?” I asked.
“Last year,” he said. “In the middle of the night!”
“Now, Michael, that’s not true,” his mother said. “I know I saw him in June or sometime around then.” She frowned in concentration. “Goodness, it has been a while—not long before vacation?”
“That’s what I mean!” he said in exasperation. “Last year. When I was in fourth grade. This year I’m in fifth.”
“When do you get your vacation break?” I asked. Las Piernas was on a year-round schedule.
His mother pulled out a PDA and looked at the calendar on it. “They had six weeks off starting June thirtieth.”
Ben, Ethan, and I exchanged a glance. That would have been a week after Lisa King’s body was found.
“Has anyone else seen Kai since then?” I asked. The others thought this over, then shook their heads.
“Well, Michael, so you were up in the middle of the night—”
“Barney was sick,” he explained, his face suddenly awash in sadness. He looked longingly at Altair and Bingle.
“Barney? Your brother?”
That brought a small smile. “No, my dog. He died.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s really hard.”
He shrugged and kept petting Bingle.
“So you were taking care of Barney,” I said gently.
“Yeah. I had to let him out in the backyard. He needed to barf. Then he wanted to stay outside for a while, so I kept him company. Then he heard something—you know, his ears went up. He went to the gate to watch something. So I followed him and saw that he was watching Kai move.”
He said that a truck and a van were in the driveway. Kai and another man finished packing up the truck, then the other man helped Kai load Violet (“her!” spoken with the air of delight felt by a boy who has seen something rare and freakish) into the van Kai usually drove. The older neighbors confirmed that once in a while they had seen Kai use a kind of gurney to load Violet into the van for doctor’s appointments.
“Big, white, windowless cargo van,” one of the men said. “Econoline, I think.”
“What did the moving truck look like?” I asked Michael.
He frowned and said, “Like a U-Haul, but it wasn’t. It was all white.”
Michael’s failure to mention this to his parents was easily explained—Barney had ended up going to the vet the next morning, so his companion’s illness had been foremost in the boy’s mind at that point.
It was also clear that the other neighbors hadn’t missed Kai and Violet Loudon. They hadn’t cared much for them, or about them. Welcome to suburbia.
I studied the exterior of the house from where we were standing. “Its windows are a little dirty, but the yard is cared for,” I said.
“Gardener comes by to work on the front yard on Fridays,” one of the women offered.
“Just the front yard?”
“Yes. I don’t believe there is a lawn in the back.”
“Anyone else use that same gardener?”
Another exchange of looks, shaking of heads. None of them recalled seeing any markings on the gardener’s pickup truck indicating who he was or how he could be reached. So unless we came back and waited around on Friday, we weren’t going to get any information out of him.
We thanked the neighbors and asked them not to follow us as we walked down the block with the dogs and crossed over to the Loudons’ yard. Ben and Ethan were just starting to give working commands to the dogs when the breeze shifted, and both dogs alerted.
Their body language suddenly changed. Their ears pitched forward, they went up on their toes, looking back at their handlers as if to ask, “Don’t you smell that?” Their excitement was controlled but evident.
Ben and Ethan let them off leash. They ran toward the backyard gate, sniffing there and along the fence, then running back to their handlers. Bingle and Altair also took interest in a small basement window. It was blacked out, as if painted on the other side, so there was no seeing what was drawing their attention.
I began to feel uneasy, wondering if I really wanted to know what was so fascinating to a pair of human remains detection dogs. I told myself not to be so fainthearted, and also not to ignore the obvious approach. Rachel stayed by my side as I went to the front door and knocked, an idea she wasn’t too crazy about, especially because simultaneously the dogs became close to frantic with their desire to get into the backyard. But no one answered.
Ben called Bingle back and said, “Time to call the police. We don’t have a warrant, we don’t want to ruin a case.”
I looked over his shoulder and said, “That won’t be necessary,” just as a black-and-white pulled up to the curb. One of the neighbors must have called them.
Two hours later, there was a bigger crowd on the sidewalk opposite the Loudon house, the closest police would let anyone come. Frank and Pete had shown up, tipped off by the patrolman, who was a friend of Frank’s. Their presence and Reed’s usua
l calm demeanor probably kept Vince from going over the edge. Reed and Vince had a warrant.
Attitudes changed not long after they accessed the property.
When the gate to the yard was forced open, the reason for the dogs’ excitement wasn’t immediately plain. A large, slightly raised wooden deck covered almost all of the yard. But the dogs both gave hard alerts as they stood over sections of the deck, and it was soon discovered that many of the boards in these sections were loose. Once those boards were lifted, it was clear that the earth beneath the deck had been disturbed. There were four areas that had been recently dug up—body-sized holes. The soil, when stirred up a bit, had a sharp, unnerving scent that even humans could recognize. No corpses could be seen in the holes, but there were bits of hair, bone, and teeth in each. There was no mistaking that these had been graves and that someone had removed remains from them.
Ben and a team of his forensic anthropology graduate students were going to be busy doing recovery and identification work.
The house itself bore all the signs of a hasty departure. The basement was pristine and was almost bypassed, except that Bingle gave signals that made Ben say, “Not so fast.” Turned out there was an exception to all the cleanliness. Bingle’s interest led police to the discovery of a false wall, behind which was a hidden room. The thick walls and floor of the room bore stains that Kai Loudon had apparently found difficult to remove.
Or, as Ben suggested, Loudon might have felt a kind of attachment to them, considered them to be erotic artwork.
I tried not to let that thought disturb me.
I also tried to feel proud of our day’s work, rather than terrified that this monster had been in my own backyard.
I failed on both counts.
TWENTY-FOUR
Donovan parked on a road that had no direct access to the camp and was not visible from it, then began the hike uphill to the property where his father and half brother were staying. Far from being a hardship, he enjoyed the opportunity to be outdoors and test skills he could not easily use in Las Piernas. Moving silently among the trees in the moonlight, he felt exhilarated, a sensation seldom part of his life these days.
He was armed, though he did not believe that the weapons would be necessary. Still, with these individuals, any possibility was a deadly possibility, so he came prepared. He was an expected visitor, although he was sure there were aspects of his visit that would be a surprise. He didn’t know how well they would handle that.
He spotted all the cameras. He had to admit that Quinn’s arrangement of them provided good coverage, but would anyone be watching the monitors? He doubted it. He waited patiently and was rewarded with the sound of a car coming up the drive. Quinn. Perfect.
He entered through a side door and was sitting in a comfortable chair with his back to the large stone fireplace when Parrish and Kai came in with Quinn. He gave them no indication that, inwardly, he was struggling not to laugh out loud at the shocked looks on their faces. A memory he would store away, treasure for another time. Best not to reveal reactions of any kind to these three.
Parrish, not surprisingly, was the first to recover. He smiled broadly and said, “Oh, excellent, Donovan! Quinn, before Donovan leaves, please ask him if he can … improve… on the security arrangements you have in place.”
“Certainly,” Quinn said, not quite able to keep the irritation out of his voice.
“You’re looking well,” Donovan said to Parrish. Parrish, now in his fifties, was not the man Donovan had seen in footage taken of him before his injuries—one of his shoulders seemed to bother him, and his movements were a little stiff. All the same, Donovan knew it would be extremely foolish to think of him as a weak old man.
“Thank you. I continue to improve.”
They seated themselves, Parrish lounging back in a large overstuffed armchair, Quinn imitating his posture—all too consciously, Donovan thought—on one end of a matching sofa. Kai sat upright, on the edge of the other end of the sofa. Kai didn’t bother trying to look relaxed.
“Now,” Parrish said, “why don’t you bring me up to date, Donovan?”
Quinn, obviously expecting to be the one called upon to do this, opened his mouth as if to object, then subsided.
Donovan chose his words carefully. “The police obtained warrants to search Kai’s home, including his backyard.”
“That much we know of from the news broadcasts,” Parrish said. “But, as usual, there are so many missing details. How did this focus on Kai come about?”
“Through the surviving prison guard—”
“The one Kai was supposed to kill?” Quinn asked.
“Through the surviving guard,” Donovan began again, “the reporters were able to identify Kai and found his home.”
“The guard learned Kai’s name?” Parrish asked incredulously. Kai tensed.
Donovan saw Quinn tense in response but answered calmly, as if neither of them were in the room. “He didn’t know Kai’s name, no. I don’t think he would have even been able to tell you the fake names Kai and Quinn gave him, if the investigators hadn’t asked about them by those names.”
“So how …?” Quinn asked.
“The frozen young woman you left in the trunk of the car.”
“He couldn’t possibly know about her!” Kai protested. “There’s no connection between the two of them.”
“You are the connection!” Quinn said. “Don’t you get that?”
“He didn’t know about her,” Donovan said, “but he knew that the police in Las Piernas—the town most closely associated with Nicholas Parrish—learned her name, and that the public radio station there has been determined to find her killer. Reporters for the station posted photographs of her on its Web site, and asked those who might have met her and taken her picture to send additional photos in to them. Amazing response, really. You could practically follow her history in the city if you really looked at the details in the photos.”
“So what has this to do with the guard?” Parrish asked impatiently.
“The guard recognized Kai as one of the people near her in one of those images.”
“This seems weak,” Parrish said. “How did he convince the police that Kai and the ambulance attendant were one and the same? The last we heard, his head injury prevented his being useful in the investigation of the escape.”
“He didn’t convince them. He’s quite impaired from the blow Kai gave him, after all. They were sure he was confused, or wanted so much to be of help he created a false memory. But Irene Kelly believed him.”
He noticed the reactions that name got from all three of them. Interesting.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Donovan went on, “whether it was the station’s pressure or her connections to the police department through her husband, but in any case, I believe she’s directly connected to the issuing of the search warrant. She was walking around asking questions in Kai’s neighborhood just before the police showed up.” He paused, then added, “I have it on good authority that, within the next twenty-four hours, there will be news reports about a secret basement room.”
Kai came to his feet.
Parrish held up a hand. “Sit down,” he said quietly.
Kai obeyed him. Donovan noted that if Kai in any way resented being ordered around by his father, he didn’t show it.
“What a mess,” Quinn said.
Parrish stared hard at him, and he, too, fell silent.
Parrish returned his gaze to Donovan and smiled. Donovan would have preferred the stare he’d just given Quinn. “You’ve been reluctant to help us, Donovan, and yet your work is always superior. Your foresight, your perfectionism, these are traits I’ve passed down to you, whether you acknowledge it or not.”
“I have no doubt you’re my father.”
“Biologically, if not in other ways?”
Donovan stayed silent.
Parrish’s smile widened. “Yes! You see, Quinn? He does not rise to bait. You two could learn from him.�
�
“If only he were willing to teach us,” Quinn said with false sweetness.
“You could learn just by observing him. I am pleased.”
“You’re better suited to teach them,” Donovan said. “I don’t have your experience.”
“Of course you don’t,” Parrish said. “No one does.” He turned to Kai. “You’ll have to stay on the property for a time. Perhaps even indoors during the day.”
“Yes, sir,” Kai said.
“What of you and Quinn?” Parrish asked Donovan. “Any renewed police interest?”
“Not since the first questioning.”
Quinn shrugged. “I was, of course, shocked that any of my properties had been put to such foul use and have taken appropriate security measures since.”
“Both of you must be extremely careful now, but I need not say more on that subject. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be with individuals who truly understand me.” He turned to Quinn. “I believe you have a special treat for Donovan before we begin the next phase of our plans?”
Quinn gave a little bow and slid one pale hand into his jacket.
Donovan watched him but didn’t show any particular excitement over what could have been a reach for a weapon. He was certain he could outdraw, evade fire, and aim better than Quinn.
Quinn smiled as he handed over a disk in a slender plastic jewel case. “You can watch it here, if you’d like, on Kai’s computer.”
“I’ll wait,” Donovan said, tucking it inside his own jacket.
“I’m surprised you care,” Kai said, watching this exchange.
Donovan stared at him. “I don’t.” He turned to Parrish. “If that’s all?”
“The security system?”
“No use having cameras if you aren’t going to monitor them. Otherwise—Well, I’m sure you’ve already implemented other defenses.”
“Yes,” Parrish said, but Donovan saw a bit of doubt in his eyes. Parrish quickly went on. “Well, then, no need to delay your return. You’ll have new instructions soon.”