Disturbance

by Jan Burke

  Within minutes, the others were there, including Donovan, who didn’t look too steady on his feet. Jack took one glance at me, then at Kai, and had such a murderous look in his eye that Frank immediately said, “Irene says he’s not worth it. Since I found her on the verge of doing what you want to do, I’d let her be the judge of that.”

  Ben had Bool with him and was praising him, while the big bloodhound practically pulled him over trying to get to me. “Hello, Boolean,” I said softly and felt tears rolling down my cheeks.

  “Sorry about the baying,” Ben said. “I don’t know what got into him.”

  “Why, Bool and I are old friends. That’s what.”

  “I just hope he didn’t endanger you with that.”

  “No, he helped save me.”

  “Extra treats for Bool, then,” Jack said and, seeing Ben’s look as he took in the situation, added, “Frank says Irene’s already fed this guy’s own balls to him, so Bool won’t be able to have those for his treats.”

  Frank had taken off his backpack and had a blanket and thermos full of hot tea for me. “It’s probably not too hot by now, but—anyway, it’s got a lot of sugar in it. You know the drill.”

  It was still warm. It was good to get a little sugar in my system.

  “You going to formally arrest this shit-heel, Frank?” Jack asked, nodding toward Kai.

  Before Frank could answer, we heard a helicopter overhead.

  “Sounds like the rangers are on the way,” Jack said. “That’s not the Sikorsky, and only their Bell could get here that fast.”

  “Good. Let the Feds take him in—Las Piernas and all the other jurisdictions can work it out with them from there. We’ve got a couple of people to get to an ER.”

  He asked Jack to radio Travis and tell the rangers where to find us. Jack had a device in hand that he used to read off coordinates. Within no time, the rangers’ helicopter was overhead. They found a place to land and joined us. I was surprised to see a familiar face among them.

  “J.C.!”

  “Oh, Irene,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Parrish is dead,” I told him. J.C.—Jay Carter—was among the few survivors of our first journey into these mountains with Parrish.

  “So I understand. Thanks.” He was looking at me with so much concern, I almost started crying again. “Look,” he said, “I know that Travis wants to take you and another victim to the hospital, and he’s fired up the Sikorsky. Are you able to walk all the way to the road, or do you want us to give you a lift?”

  “Her arm’s broken,” Frank said.

  “How about a lift then?” I said. I eyed Kai uneasily though.

  “He’ll wait here with a couple of the other rangers until we come back for him. I may even get our rescue guys to take him to a local hospital in a different chopper.”

  Before long, we were on our way to Las Piernas. Donovan insisted that he’d prefer to be taken to St. Anne’s, too. An EMT working with the rescue squad kindly helped to splint the arm for the trip and offered painkillers. We both passed up the offer, tempting as it was.

  We had a lot of talking and planning to do.

  When I first got to the Sikorsky, Donovan looked so dismayed by my now very swollen face, I said, “Remember, the other guy looks worse.”

  He laughed at that, and Frank said, “She’s right.” Donovan laughed harder.

  When Frank looked at him a little uneasily, I said, “I know what’s it’s like. Until you can cry, you have a risk of getting a little hysterical over the oddest things. I got the giggles over Parrish’s corpse a little while ago.”

  “I was going to ask you about that,” Frank said. “Stabbed, shot, and garroted?”

  “If it hadn’t rained on him, I would have thought of setting him on fire.”

  Donovan laughed over that one, too. He needed bed rest.

  “She beat the hell out of him, too,” Donovan said.

  “Disarmed him and gave him his black eye,” I bragged.

  “You …”

  “We have got to do something nice for Rachel,” I said.

  “I don’t know if I can hear any more of this right now,” Frank said.

  I gave him a one-armed hug. “So tell me about your day.”

  So Frank told me about visiting Quinn Moore and going on “vacation,” the text messages, Roderick Beignet, and all that Donovan had left in the Forester to help him find us.

  “So that’s what happened to Parrish’s cell phone!”

  “I took it from him when I was adjusting his backpack,” Donovan said.

  “I used the first locator to find Donovan,” Frank said. “He was looking for you. Then he gave me his, and I went on from there, while Jack and Ben took him back to the helicopter.”

  I told Frank about meeting Roderick in the Busy Bee Cafe and apologized for not telling him the truth about the damaged phone.

  “I don’t care about that,” he said. “I know you were feeling hemmed in. I’m just so damned glad you’re alive.”

  That went straight into the Very Big Book of Reasons I Will Remain Married to Frank Harriman for As Long As He’ll Have Me, but I was still uneasy. “If I had told you, you would have checked his background, and maybe we would have found out about Donovan’s daughter sooner—”

  “Or maybe my daughter would have been killed immediately if Parrish worried the police were getting too close,” Donovan said.

  Pete called not long before we landed. Frank told him Donovan and I were listening to the call. I worried that he might try to accuse Donovan of something, but he didn’t. He started off by telling us how glad he was that we’d survived. But he had big news of his own.

  “We caught Roderick Beignet. Donovan Cotter, your little girl is fine—not to say she hasn’t been scared by all this, but she’s happy to be rescued. Not sure if your mother-in-law is going to make it. Roderick’s been afraid to refill a prescription for a heart medication she needed, and he didn’t bother to try to get it any other way. They’ve taken her and the girl to St. Anne’s.”

  “We’re headed there now,” Donovan said.

  “Good. Miranda wants to meet the person she calls her ‘real dad.’”

  He swallowed hard, then said, “I want to meet her, too.”

  “So what did Roderick have to say for himself?” Frank asked.

  “Since I put him under arrest, I can quote him exactly. Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “‘My rights! My rights! What about my rights?’ I told him that, other than the ones I had just read to him, I didn’t think he had any, but he should check with his attorney.”

  “He has one?”

  “Well, that’s the kicker, Frank. He wanted to hire one of his nephew’s attorneys.”

  “Who’s his nephew?” “Quinn Moore.”

  “Quinn Moore!” It was echoed over at least three headsets.

  “Thing is, none of those attorneys were interested in taking his case, mostly because he can’t afford them. He’s in a bind because we managed to get a judge to agree with us that Quinn’s assets ought to be frozen, given the indications we have that he participated in some serious crimes. Enough indication to get a warrant out on him, although we’re pretty sure he’s out of the country. Just not sure where.”

  “Yet,” Frank said.

  “Yet,” Pete agreed. “Anyway, turns out old Roderick is Parrish’s half brother.”

  “Half brother?” I said. “I’ve never heard of him having any siblings other than his sister.”

  “Same father. The parents divorced, the dad remarried, Roderick is the child of that marriage.”

  “How many more of them are out there?” I asked.

  No one had an answer.

  FIFTY-SIX

  I spent a lot of time answering a lot of questions from people in law enforcement. Fortunately, our friend and attorney, Dina Willner—who had taken over Zeke Brennan’s law firm after he retired—loves a challenge. I don’t know how Dina managed to find the
time and energy to keep all of us out of hot water, but she did.

  I was able to talk the doctors at St. Anne’s into letting me go home two days later. Ethan had visited me as soon as I got back and told me to return to work only when I really felt able to do so.

  “See you next week, then,” I said.

  “You don’t know that yet,” he said.

  “Neither do you.”

  This led to a bet, which I won, but he got the best of me by teasing me endlessly when, on my return, I mentioned that I noticed the receptionist was gone. He made fun of the way I had tried to casually ask about it.

  “Admit it,” he said. “You thought I was fishing off the company pier.”

  “I wasn’t certain,” I said. “At least not about you. I apologize for that. But if you’re going to tell me she didn’t try to make a play for you—”

  “I found a job for her at another station,” he said. “I couldn’t take much more of her making excuses to stop by my office.”

  I raised a brow, picked up a pen, and tapped out a message on my desk in Morse code. He laughed and said, “It’s not bragging if it’s true.”

  I stayed in touch with Donovan. We were all able to breathe easier when we learned that he was not going to be charged with any crimes. Dina convinced the D.A. not only that Donovan was coerced into all his activities on Parrish’s behalf but also that he had a great deal to do with my rescue and the arrests of several Moths. I, of course, would never agree to testify that I was drugged by him, since, after all, I was out drinking with a friend that afternoon. Who could say what had happened?

  Then there was the matter of the police failing him when he initially reported his daughter and his former mother-inlaw missing, a failure that nearly caused the death of Marguerite Page and put the child at the mercy of a man like Roderick Beignet. That, Dina said, was being looked at by the people in her firm who handled civil cases.

  Perhaps the most convincing argument was the way the public embraced Donovan himself. Aside from his story, there was his unblemished record of service to his country. He had a handsome face and a beautiful child, and they both became instant media darlings. The—elected—D.A. is not a stupid man. Besides, the D.A.’s kindness toward Donovan guaranteed the cooperation of important witnesses in bigger cases.

  Kai loudon awaits trial. He has done a lot of talking about Quinn Moore from his jail cell.

  Roderick Beignet, in a cell not far from Kai’s, does the same. Roderick has the gift, Pete says, of never telling a story the same way twice. “And still manages to avoid including facts in any version.”

  Quinn Moore has not been seen since he checked himself out of the hospital.

  I spend a certain amount of time in my life trying to convince myself he is unlikely to come after me.

  So many kindnesses came my way.

  Some that might seem trivial were important to me.

  Travis, Ethan, and Jack went back to the mountains and made sure that no gear got left behind. Although law enforcement took everything in the cave, impounded the Subaru, and removed some of what was in our “camp” as evidence, there were a few items still there—and my guys made sure those items got taken out of the wilderness, and spared me having to revisit a beautiful place that was too freshly attached to nightmares.

  I would be a liar if I tried to pretend that being able to fight back meant I walked away victorious and that was that. The mind plays tricks. Against fifteen minutes or so of action, I had hours of terror as Kai and Parrish’s captive. Even winning a brutal fight does not, it turns out, give a person a mental erase button. In fact, sometimes the replay goes haywire, and where you won in real life, imagination shows you a convincing picture of a different denouement. You pull the trigger and the gun doesn’t fire. The garrote breaks in two. A corpse rises and grabs you by the throat. You are held down by someone younger and stronger, who is reaching between you, and nothing you do stops him.

  You wake or snap out of it, but not without moments of being unsure of the true outcome.

  During those first weeks, Ben and J.C. called often, as did a couple of other survivors of the first trip, talking me through the days when even therapy sessions weren’t enough to keep me from feeling the vulnerability and terror that follow being held hostage. Other friends helped, too.

  No one was as good to me, or as essential to my getting through those days, as Frank. He was, I realized, always going to be the luckiest thing that ever came of any of my luck.

  Because of them, I persevered.

  I was surprised when I went to visit Donovan, one day about a month after our adventures, to see that this one-time loner—who had already taken his former mother-in-law and his daughter under his roof—now had a tenant. Violet Loudon had moved in, along with an aide she had hired after selling her house.

  Donovan and I sat on the patio, watching Miranda play with a calico cat—another addition. “This is quite a change for you,” I said.

  “I find I do better with groups of women than I do living with just one.” He blushed. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  I laughed. “I understood what you meant.”

  “Miranda needs her grandmother. Violet needs all of us. I need all of them.” He paused, then said, “The universe is expanding, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You call on me, Irene Kelly, any time. I’ve got your back, however far out you stand on the edge of your universe.”

  The universe expanded all about me. I could adapt, change, acquire new skills, accept the kindness of friends, accept a new kind of friend. What had seemed to me an impossibility—that I could prevail over such attackers—turned out to be within my grasp. And if that victory had a price, I knew defeat would have had a greater one.

  A once utterly unimaginable possibility—that I would not be a newspaper reporter at this time of my life—was a reality. I still grieve the loss of the Express. In one way or another, perhaps I always will.

  It turns out, though, that what we grieve can show us what we have truly loved and why we loved it, and what we should reach for again in the coming day, should we choose to reach at all.

  I choose to reach.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I was once told by a college professor that no classroom lecturer could be held responsible for the mangled information that ended up in his students’ notes. Similarly, the individuals who helped with this book should not be blamed for my errors.

  I am indebted to my friends who work or have worked for newspapers. To all of you, wherever you find yourselves now, my deepest gratitude for your help. Thank you for your work as professionals in a field that deserves to be better valued.

  Edward J. Dohring, M.D., whose name my readers may recognize from previous books, is a board-certified orthopedic spine surgeon, a fellowship-trained spine surgeon, medical director of the Spine Institute of Arizona, and a researcher and teacher on the care of spinal disorders. His help with the passages about Parrish’s injury and recovery was invaluable, as was his review of information about Violet’s care.

  Kitty Felde, a National Public Radio special correspondent and an award-winning playwright, was of immeasurable assistance when I asked her to talk to me about Irene’s career change. She was able to offer insights from her own experiences and brought her wonderful imagination to the task of anticipating the challenges Irene would face.

  What Rachel taught Irene about self-defense comes from true leaders in the martial arts. Grandmaster Al Tracy (who has been teaching karate for over fifty years) and his wife, Kenpo karate black belt (7th dan) Pat Tracy, who run Tracy’s International Studios of Self Defense, generously shared their expertise, read and reread fight scenes, and offered excellent advice.

  Among my journalist friends, I must take time to individually thank Debbie Arrington, who from the moment I decided I wanted to write about a newspaper reporter, never has failed to spare me the time it took to answer my questions.

  Thanks also to my nephew
, Detective John Pearsley, Jr., of the El Cajon Police, who answered my frantic late-night emails on police procedure. Forensic anthropologist Marilyn London answered my questions about age determination and frozen remains. Melodie Grace and my brother, John G. Fischer, helped with questions about legal procedures.

  I am also indebted to my sister Sandra Fischer, who read each chapter as it was written and caught many of my errors.

  This book received shepherding from Marysue Rucci and Amanda Murray, and most especially from Sarah Knight at Simon & Schuster. I’m also indebted to Philip Spitzer, my agent, for his feedback. Thank you all!

  Tim, who has met the challenge of living with me with both humor and bravery, has all my love.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jan Burke is the national bestselling author of thirteen novels and a collection of short stories. Among the awards her work has garnered are Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar(r) for Best Novel, Malice Domestic’s Agatha Award, Mystery Readers International’s Macavity Award, and the RT Book Club’s Best Contemporary Mystery. She is the founder of the Crime Lab Project and is a member of the board of the California Forensic Science Institute. She lives in Southern California with her husband and two dogs. Learn more about her at www.janburke.com.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Description

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Content

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen