by Jan Burke
Other factors played their own roles in violent behavior, of course, and these studies did not imply that every child of someone who killed was destined to be a killer. There was a great deal of work yet to be done before the biology of violence could be thoroughly understood.
Kai’s neighbor had hinted that Kai’s stepfather abused him. I looked again at Donovan, wondering what his family history had been. I wasn’t sure what to believe of what he had told me at the Fireside.
So here I was at the family dinner table, such as it was. It occurred to me that Donovan’s display of dominance had not only allowed me to move around without my hands and ankles taped but had probably allowed me to use the restroom with the door closed. It might also be why I was eating at the table, treated not as an object but as an individual during that meal. Donovan was distracting the others from me though not overtly.
“What do you want to do about sleeping shifts?” he asked Parrish.
Parrish puffed up a little with this deference. He checked his watch. “It’s ten o’clock now. I want to be on the road again at two. Kai will stand guard.”
No one raised an objection. Donovan again took on the role of leading me, holding my upper arm and guiding me to an area where there were five cots. He took me to the one closest to the wall and told me to lie down, that Kai would not hesitate to shoot me if I moved from the cot. He then lay down on the cot next to mine, facing away from me.
Parrish laughed as he took the next one over and said, “Yes, Irene, you’ll soon be very busy, so rest up.”
Whether Donovan’s positioning was protective or possessive, I could not tell. I did not fall asleep as quickly as I had in the SUV. My last waking moments were spent wondering why there were five cots and five chairs at the table. I remembered that Violet had said Quinn Moore was one of the half siblings. I had no idea why he was missing, but I felt a flicker of hope. Maybe he was ratting out his “family.” Then again, maybe they had killed him. If nothing else, the extra chair and cot must mean they were shorthanded now. I was outnumbered only three to one instead of an obviously planned-for four to one.
I would have felt better with a different lineup on the opposing team.
I woke with something cold and hard pressing painfully against my forehead and opened my eyes to see Kai Loudon staring down at me. He pushed a little harder, until I thought he might intend to kill me just by driving his gun barrel into my skull.
He smiled. “Wake up, you fucking bitch.”
FORTY-FOUR
Rachel had taught me a set of moves that I probably could have executed before he executed me. Even lying flat on my back, I could have disarmed him, especially since he apparently didn’t think I was much of a threat. He was right-handed—his wounded arm would make him even more vulnerable. I could make him feel intense pain and possibly disable him enough to keep him from coming after me if I made a run for it.
Which still left two other assholes to deal with. And the run-for-it idea had a major drawback—even if I somehow managed to get out of the building, there was nothing close by that would offer cover or a haven. Recapture seemed inevitable, and the follow-up might include removal of my hands, which would make everything else Rachel had taught me a little more difficult to do.
I decided to save my energy for a later fight, and in the meantime encourage his idea that I was incapable of self-defense. So far, all he had ordered me to do was wake up, and I had definitely obeyed.
I wondered, in those seconds of looking into Kai’s eyes and seeing his desire to pull the trigger, if it might not be worth it to go ahead and resist while I could still breathe.
“Let’s go, Kai,” a voice said. To my surprise, it was Parrish’s.
Kai’s smile grew, and he eased up on the pressure, then stood.
“How’s the arm?” Donovan asked, and Kai finally looked away from me.
“Better. Still hurts, though.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“Kai,” Parrish said with impatience, “help me with the car. Donovan, tape her hands and feet again.”
“Do you need to use the restroom?” Donovan asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
He escorted me, as before, although I didn’t need to lean on him this time, my circulation having recovered. When we were close to the bathroom, I whispered, “Why are you helping them?”
“Don’t take too long,” he said and stepped away from me.
When I came out, Parrish was standing next to Donovan, who was listening to someone on the phone. “That’s enough for now,” Parrish said, taking the phone away. Parrish was silent as he walked to the far end of the building, then spoke in a low, angry voice into the phone. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. If Donovan had any reaction to the call, I couldn’t see it.
Not much later, I was in the backseat with Parrish again at my side, my hands and feet bound, although this time, warm gloves had been placed on my hands. The oddity of this bit of care made me wonder if they were designed to keep my hands warm or to keep me from leaving fingerprints somewhere.
Donovan drove. Kai, in the front passenger seat again, had fallen asleep even before we began our ascent into the mountains.
Parrish, I had noticed, looked tired, as if he hadn’t slept well. Donovan must have noticed this, too.
“I think I slept better in the car than on that damned cot,” Donovan said.
Parrish laughed. “They were pieces of shit, weren’t they? I’ll have a talk with the person who bought them.”
“Didn’t do a bad job of supplying the place otherwise, though,” Donovan said.
“No,” Parrish admitted. “But the main purpose was to have a safe place to rest.”
“I wish you had let me set it up. I don’t like so many people being able to talk about where you’ve been or where you might be next.”
“Don’t worry, Donovan. I have an excellent ability to determine who is and isn’t truly loyal to me.”
“Right. Like Quinn Moore.”
Parrish shot a glance at me, then frowned. “I really would prefer, Son, that you not toss names around quite so freely.”
“As if she’s going to live to tell anybody.”
I moved my head so that all any of them could see was the back of my parka. I fantasized about getting that cell phone away from Parrish at some point, but this seemed so unlikely, I began to ask myself why I bothered dreaming that I was going to escape. I stared out the window, struggling against despair, thinking of people I wished I could see one more time. You are alive. Stay focused, stay alive.
“All the same,” Parrish insisted, “I require more discretion from you.”
“Okay, I hear what you’re saying.”
“I wonder if you do,” Parrish said.
“Of course I do. You really don’t think any of your children are stupid, do you?”
“Stupid? No. Disloyal? Well, you’ve answered that one already.”
Donovan continued to puzzle me. What was real, and what was manipulation? What was a show to gain my compliance, what was a show for Parrish and Kai? Violet had said they had a hold over him. At the time, I had still been shaking off the effects of being drugged—by him.
My conversation with Donovan at the Fireside came back to me. What if he had told me the truth even as he drugged me? I tried to focus my mind, recall the details. He had unknowingly fathered a daughter whose existence had been hidden from him by his ex-wife. The ex-wife had told another man that the child was his. The ex-wife had died, and eventually, it had been proved that Donovan was the child’s biological father. From there, things were hazy, but I did recall that he had said this was a missing person case, that his daughter had disappeared, along with her grandmother.
So if Parrish and his Moths had somehow taken the child and grandmother … would Donovan care enough about them to involve himself in a number of crimes—aiding and abetting Parrish, kidnapping me, making himself an accessory to murder, to name a few—for a child he had ne
ver met and an ex-mother-in-law?
I thought about Quinn Moore. There was no question of his involvement now, and the more I considered that, the easier certain aspects of Parrish’s escape and ability to remain hidden were to figure out. Primarily, Quinn could bring money and other resources into the picture. And he owned the properties on which the bodies of Kai’s victims had been found.
I found myself suddenly sitting upright then. Kai had buried his victims in his own backyard. The frozen victims had not shown the level of decay that would have been evident in remains that had spent even a short period of time in the ground. Were those frozen victims Quinn Moore’s?
Parrish noticed my change in posture and began talking about his elaborate plans for torturing me. He was sorry, he said, that they would be without electricity, because there were a number of ways he wanted to use it on me. Kai gleefully pointed out that a car battery would work just fine.
This discussion was interrupted when Donovan asked, “Do you want me to take the usual roads from here? Or do you have a special route in mind?”
Parrish had a special route, of course.
“Quinn knows where we’re headed,” Donovan said, apparently willing to break Parrish’s rule again. “I’m concerned about that.”
“Quinn thinks he knows where we’re headed,” Parrish said. “He does not. Besides, I doubt he’ll be so foolish as to cooperate with the police. If he does, neither he nor they will be pleased with the outcome.”
As I watched out the window, we drove from areas of dry scrub into forest. We were on narrow, unmaintained, and often muddy dirt roads that twisted and turned in single lanes, and if nothing else, I had to admire Donovan’s driving skills—I don’t think I would have tackled most of those roads in the dark. The unavoidable jolting bothered Kai and Parrish more than it did me, and I took secret pleasure in that.
The trees were taking misty shape in gray light. Twilight.
I thought of a friend who was an amateur astronomer, who’d told me that, although most people did not think of this time of day as twilight, associating that term only with the end of a day, twilight was also the time before dawn, a period of incomplete darkness.
The sky lightened, and above and around me and within me, the universe continued to expand.
Nick Parrish did not know me.
I was not the person Nick Parrish had known the last time I had been in his power. I was not the person I had been when I first learned of his escape.
Like the rest of the universe, I had changed. So had he.
If Donovan was my ally and not my enemy, we actually had a good chance of defeating my two other captors.
I wasn’t sure he was my ally, though. The fact that he was helping them take me into the wilderness with them didn’t make it seem likely that I mattered to him, and if I was the price for his child’s life—however little he’d had to do with that life—I could not bring myself to blame him for making the trade.
The SUV came to a halt.
“All right, let’s get going,” Parrish said.
“I’ll help you unload, hide the car, then meet you there,” Donovan said.
“What the fuck?” Kai said, raising the gun and pointing it at Donovan. “Dad told you to get going.”
Behaving as if Kai wasn’t sitting next to him, let alone aiming a weapon at him, Donovan turned toward Parrish and said, “I know you planned for Quinn to take care of this, but he’s not going to come up here. There’s no way in hell he can make it, even if he wants to rejoin you, and you know it. If we leave a car here, we might as well light off a fireworks display announcing where you are.”
“No one can trace this vehicle to me.”
“If Quinn keeps his mouth shut.”
Parrish opened his mouth to protest, then shut it, frowning. He shook his head. “You may be right. But as I’m sure you’re also aware, you are needed to carry additional supplies. I don’t think I really want to give you the chance to drive off and tell the police where we are.”
“You know why I won’t do that.”
“Really? Do I?”
“Of course you do.”
Parrish studied him for a long moment.
Kai said, “I can get rid of the car.”
“You, who have no outdoor experience, are going to hike back several miles off trail?” Donovan asked. “Injured?”
“While I wish it weren’t so, Kai,” Parrish said, “he has a point.”
Kai looked angry but said nothing more.
“All you have to do is stay hidden until I can reach you. You’ve already got more than enough supplies there to be comfortable. You can catch up on your sleep. It won’t take me long.”
“How long?”
“Depends on how far I have to go to find a place to hide the vehicle, but I don’t think it will be more than five hours.”
“Five hours!”
“Think. They’ll be searching by air. They know you’ve been active in these mountains before. You want me to leave this car anywhere near you?”
Parrish brooded. The rest of us stayed silent. I would have loved to have added invisibility to my attributes, especially when Parrish’s brooding suddenly shifted its focus to me.
“I have some plans for Irene, so I suppose I can make a start on those. If you aren’t back in five hours, don’t expect to find us at the cave. I don’t think I’ll just sit there waiting for you to show up with the police.”
“If I thought it would do any good to argue with you that the last thing I want right now is to be anywhere near law enforcement, I’d sit here for another twenty minutes to do it. As it is, every minute we’re here is another minute when the sun gets farther up in the sky, which will make it easier for this SUV to be spotted on a road that is supposed to be open only to the Forest Service.”
The argument seemed to work. Donovan helped me get out of the backseat and cut the tape on my ankles.
The air was cold. I was glad for the parka. I could hear water flowing nearby, a small stream, judging by the sound of it.
The forest carried that rich scent that comes only with autumn, the sharp crispness of pine that had filled the air for the few hours of our drive combined with damp, dark earth, fallen leaves, and decay.
Donovan went to the back of the SUV and unloaded a few things—the shovel and two light packs. Kai took charge of the shovel, a folding type used by campers, which he managed to do only by holstering his gun. He seemed confused and overwhelmed. Parrish took out another gun and held it on me while Donovan helped Kai. He took Kai’s parka off and removed his injured arm from its sling, then helped him don the parka again, carefully guiding the injured arm into the parka’s sleeve. Donovan was gentle, but Kai was clearly cold and in pain while this went on. Donovan picked up one of the day packs, adjusting its straps and belt to better fit it over the parka, then arranged Kai’s arm in the sling again. He fitted the shovel into the pack as well, trying to center its weight.
Next he helped Parrish to don the other pack, again adjusting the straps. Parrish grew irritable as we stood there in the cold and snapped at Donovan to stop fussing over him. Donovan asked him when he had last carried anything on his back. Parrish stopped objecting and allowed him to ensure that the shoulder harness, sternum strap, and hip belt rested where they should.
Finally, Donovan stood before me. I had thought I was fearful before, but now I realized there were other levels of panic I could achieve. The notion of being left with Parrish and Kai without Donovan suddenly made me aware of all the ways in which he had served as a buffer, in which he had been the alpha dog in this pack whether they saw it or not. He had been subtly controlling them, whatever his reasons for doing so, and now he was in all likelihood abandoning me.
He reached in the hood of my parka and roughly took my face between his hands, which were ungloved and already chilled by the mountain air. He looked straight into my eyes and said in a cold, hard tone, “You’ll move faster if I don’t tape your mouth shut, bec
ause you’ll be able to breathe better and drink water as needed. But if you start screaming or do anything else to attract attention, you’ll be gagged. Do you understand?”
I stayed silent because, hidden by the hood, his fingers were tapping against my face, and I needed to concentrate on that tapping.
“Understand?” he asked again, more harshly.
I nodded.
He released me. “Good.”
He turned back to Parrish. “See you in a few hours.”
He got into the SUV and backed it down the narrow road, until he came to a place where he could turn around. We watched its taillights vanish around the first curve in the road.
Parrish turned on a flashlight and began to walk toward an opening in the trees. We were soon making our way along the stream. I was marched behind Parrish, with Kai bringing up the rear. Kai stayed close to me. I could hear his breathing grow rapid. Whether that was because of pain from his wound, altitude sickness, or a city boy’s fear at finding himself in the woods at night, I didn’t know.
With my hands bound, I began to realize how much I used my arms to help me stay balanced when walking. The uneven route along the stream was especially difficult, and I didn’t find it much easier when we were hiking over tree roots. Parrish wasn’t moving very fast, but five times I nearly fell, once recovering my balance just before landing in the icy cold stream.
Before long birds were beginning to sing, and squirrels and jays chattered noisily above us. Parrish turned off his flashlight and pocketed it as dawn broke.