by Tami Hoag
“Long ago and far away,” she murmured, magic words to ward off the memories.
She could see Wright against a dark background. Staring at her with eyes that were bottomless black holes, soulless, staring into her, through her. The corners of his mouth turned up in a smile that made her blood run cold. He knew something she didn't. The game plan. The big picture. He looked inside her and laughed at something she couldn't see.
Then his image blurred into another. “I frighten you, Ms. North? You don't strike me as the sort of woman who would be easily frightened.” He stepped closer, leaned closer. She tried to back away and found herself held to the spot, unable to move. She could feel the energy around him. Seductive. The word wrapped itself around her like curling fingers of smoke. “. . . assumptions can be very dangerous things . . .”
Ellen jerked awake with a cry that brought Harry's head up. Her heart was pounding, her glasses askew. She pulled them off and set them aside with a trembling hand as she tried to jump-start her brain. A sound. A sound had snapped her to consciousness. A bang or a thump, she wasn't sure.
Holding her breath, she strained to listen. Nothing. But in the back of her mind that dark voice whispered. “If I were after you . . . I would . . . follow you home, find a way to slip into your house or garage . . . catch you where there would be little chance of witnesses or interference.”
The killer-blue eyes stared up at her from the pages of the Newsweek she had dug out of the recycling bin. She picked up the magazine and glared at his image. It was an artsy shot full of shadows. He stared at the camera, looking tough, his hands curled around the bars of a wrought-iron fence. His hair was brown, cropped short with a hint of a cowlick in front. His face was masculine, angular, with a slim, straight nose and a stubborn chin. In contrast his mouth was full, sculpted, almost feminine, far too sexy. The kind of mouth that hinted at dark, sensual, secret talents.
The headline read “Crime Boss” in bold black letters. The caption—“Crime pays big time for Jay Butler Brooks.”
Ellen scowled at the photograph. “I should have had you arrested.”
Disgusted with herself, she tossed the magazine aside and crawled out from under the covers and the books. Trying to ignore the uneasiness that curled through her midsection, she picked up the half-empty glass of white wine from the table and padded barefoot across the plush ivory carpet. Her doors were locked. Her alarm system was on the bed, watching her.
Sipping absently at the wine, she pulled aside the thick swag of ivory lace at the window and looked out at the night. The new snow sparkled like a carpet of white diamonds beneath the light of a crescent moon. Beautiful. Peaceful. No hint of the storm that had slapped Minnesota over the weekend. No evidence of the violence that had put Megan O'Malley in the hospital. No sign of Josh Kirkwood. Just another quiet night in the Lakeside subdivision. The Kirkwoods' neighborhood. Garrett Wright's neighborhood.
Her house was less than two blocks away from theirs. She could see a wedge of lake from her living room, was within walking distance of Quarry Hills Park, where Mitch and Megan and Garrett Wright had played out a life-and-death drama Saturday night. Ellen had been sitting in front of her fireplace sharing cappuccino and conversation with a friend, oblivious to what was happening a stone's throw from her own home.
Harry raised his head abruptly, a growl rumbling low in his throat. The dog jumped down off the bed and stood at attention at the door that led into the darkened hall. Ellen stood in the center of the room, pulse rate jumping, trying to recall in detail the actual act of locking the doors. She had come in from the garage into the kitchen. She always locked the dead bolt as she came in for the night. It was habit. She had gone out the front door for the mail, come back in, turned that dead bolt as her gaze scanned the words YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS.
The doors were locked. There were no odd sounds emanating from the nether regions of the living room. With that knowledge bolstering her courage, she stepped past the dog and into the hall. Harry gave a little whine of embarrassment and trailed after her, bumping up against her legs as she paused on the short flight of steps that led down to the living room.
Faint silver light filtered in around the edges of the blinds. The comfortable sofas and chairs were indistinct hulks in the dark. Nothing moved. No one spoke. Beneath the warm flannel of her pajamas Ellen's skin pebbled with goose bumps. The fine hairs on the back of her neck rose as another low growl rumbled in Harry's throat.
The telephone trilled its high-pitched birdcall. The sound ripped through the room like a shotgun blast. Harry gallumphed in a clumsy circle, his booming bark all but rattling the framed photographs on the walls. The phone rang again.
The last call she had got in the middle of the night had been Mitch telling her Olie Swain was dead. Maybe Wright had been struck down with remorse and killed himself, too, but she doubted it. She had told Karen Wright to call any time of day or night. Maybe Wright's wife had found her way out of the fog of denial.
“Ellen North,” she answered, her voice automatically taking on the same tone she used at the office.
Silence.
“Hello?”
The silence seemed to grow thicker, heavier with expectation.
“Karen? Is that you?”
No response. The caller remained on the line, silent, waiting. Another minute ticked past on the nightstand clock.
“Karen, if it's you, don't be afraid to talk to me. I'm here to listen.”
Still nothing except the creepy certainty that someone was on the other end of the line. The hope that that someone was Karen Wright evaporated. Ellen waited as another minute slipped past.
“Look,” she said crisply, “if you're not even going to bother to talk dirty to me, hang up and free the line for someone who knows how to make an obscene phone call.”
Not a sound.
Ellen slammed the receiver down, telling herself it was a tactical move rather than nerves, a lie that was made painfully clear by the way she jumped as the phone rang again. She stared at it as it rang a second and third time, then gave herself a mental kick and picked it up.
“Ellen North.”
“Ellen, it's Mitch. Josh is home.”
Journal Entry
January 25, 1994
They think they have us
Guilty as Sin
Caught in the act
Dead to rights
Dead wrong.
CHAPTER 4
Josh, did the man hurt you?”
Josh didn't answer. He looked away at the poster on the wall instead. The poster was of a man on a gray horse jumping a fence. It was bright and colorful. Josh thought he might like to ride a horse like that someday. He closed his eyes and pretended to dream he was riding the gray horse on the moon.
Dr. Robert Ulrich bit back a sigh, flicked a glance at Mitch, then turned to Hannah. “I can't find any signs that he's been sexually abused.”
Hannah stood beside the examination table where Josh sat wearing a thin blue-print cotton gown. He looked so small, so defenseless. The harsh fluorescent lighting gave his skin a ghostly pallor. She kept one hand on his arm to reassure him—and herself. A doctor herself, she knew better than to interfere with the proceedings, but she couldn't bring herself to sit in the chair three feet away. She hadn't broken contact with him since she had opened the front door of the house and found him standing on the step two hours ago.
She had been trying to sleep—something she didn't do very well anymore. The bed seemed too big, the house too quiet, too empty. She had told Paul to leave Saturday night, but he had been lost to her long before that. The happy partnership they had once shared seemed a distant memory. Lately all they had between them was tension and bitterness. The man she had married ten years ago had been sweet and gentle, full of hope and enthusiasm. The man she had faced two nights ago was angry and petty and jealous, discontented and emotionally abusive. She didn't know him anymore. She didn't want to.
And s
o she had lain alone in their big bed, staring up at the skylight and the black swatch of January night, wondering what she would do. How would she cope, who would she be. That was a big question: who would she be? She certainly wasn't the same woman she had been two weeks before. She felt like a stranger to herself. The only thing clear was that she would cope, somehow. She had to for herself and for Lily . . . and for Josh, for the day he came home.
Then there he was, standing on the front step.
Afraid the spell might break, she hadn't let go of him since that moment. Her fingers stroked the soft skin of her son's forearm, assuring her he was real and alive.
“Hannah? Are you listening to me?”
She blinked and focused on Bob Ulrich's square face. He was closer to fifty than forty. He had been a friend to her from the day she had come to interview for a staff position at Deer Lake Community Hospital. He had been influential in the board's recent decision to name her head of the ER. He had delivered Lily and removed Josh's tonsils. He had come to the hospital tonight at her request to examine Josh. He looked at her now with concern.
“Yes,” Hannah said. “I'm sorry, Bob.”
“Do you want to sit? You look a little woozy.”
“No.”
Mitch contradicted her without saying a word, sliding a stool up behind her and pressing her onto it with a hand on her shoulder. Her blue eyes were glassy, her hair a mass of golden waves hastily tied back. The past weeks had taken a toll on her physically. Naturally slender, she now looked thin to the point of anorexia. She had stood beside the table for the entire exam, holding Josh's hand, staring at his face, leaning over to kiss his forehead. She didn't seem to be aware of the tears streaming down her cheeks. Mitch pulled a clean handkerchief out of his hip pocket, pressed it into her free hand, and wondered where the hell Paul was.
He should have been here for this, for Josh, for Hannah. Hannah had tried to call him at his office, which was where he had been spending his nights, and had got his machine. Mitch had sent a squad car to the office complex. Nearly two hours later there was still no sign of Paul. And God knew, tomorrow, when Paul would be the center of attention for the press, he would blame the police department for not rushing him to his son's side.
Josh had been absolutely silent throughout the whole ordeal, not uttering a sound of fear or discomfort. He answered no questions.
Mitch hoped the last would be a temporary condition. This was already a case with too many questions and not enough answers. While Josh's reappearance was cause for celebration, it added to the Q column. With Garrett Wright sitting in a jail cell, who had brought Josh home? Did Wright have an accomplice? What few clues they had pointed to Olie Swain. Olie had audited some of Wright's classes at Harris. Olie had the van that fit the witness description. But the van had yielded them nothing, and Olie Swain was dead.
“There's no sign of penetration,” Dr. Ulrich said quietly, keeping one eye on Josh, who seemed to be asleep sitting up. “No redness, no tearing.”
“We'll see what the slides show,” Mitch said.
“I'm guessing they'll be clean.”
The doctor had conducted the standard rape kit, searching Josh literally from head to toe for any sign of a sexual assault. Oral and rectal swabs taken would be tested for seminal fluid. Mitch had overseen the exam as a matter of duty, watching like a hawk to be certain Ulrich didn't skip anything, well aware the doctor had little in the way of practical experience with this kind of procedure. Just another of the challenges of law enforcement outside the realm of a city, where rape was not an uncommon crime. Deer Lake Community Hospital didn't even own a Wood's lamp—a fluorescent lamp used to scan the skin surface for signs of seminal fluid. Not that a Wood's lamp would have done them much good in Josh's case. The boy appeared scrubbed clean, and the scent of soap and shampoo clung to him. Any evidence they may have got had literally gone down a drain.
“What about his arm? You think they drugged him?”
“There's certainly been a needle in that vein,” Ulrich said, gently pulling Josh's left arm toward him for a second look at the fine marks and faint bruising on the skin of his inner elbow. “We'll have to wait for the lab results on the blood tests.”
“They took blood,” Hannah murmured, stroking a hand over her son's tousled sandy-brown curls. “I told you, Mitch. I saw it.”
He gave her a poker face that told her he was politely refraining from comment. He probably thought she'd finally cracked. She couldn't blame him. She had never put much stock in the ravings of people who claimed they saw things in dreams. If she had been asked to diagnose a woman in her own situation, she would have probably said the stress was too much, that her mind was trying to compensate. But she knew in her heart what she had seen in that dream Friday night: Josh standing alone, thinking of her, wearing a pair of striped pajamas she had never seen before. The same striped pajamas he had been wearing tonight, which Mitch Holt had bagged to send to the BCA lab.
Mitch leaned down to Josh's eye level. “Josh, can you tell me if someone took blood from your arm?”
Eyes closed, Josh turned to his mother, reaching for her. Hannah slid off the stool and gathered him close. “He's exhausted,” she said impatiently. “And cold. Why is it so damn cold in this hospital?”
“You're right, Hannah,” Ulrich said calmly. “It's after two. We've done all we need to for tonight. Let's get you and Josh settled into a room.”
Hannah's head came up as alarm flooded through her. “You're keeping him here?”
“I think it's wisest, considering the circumstances. For observation,” he added, trying to take the edge off her panic. “Someone is watching Lily, right?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Josh has been through a lot. Let's just keep an eye on him for a day or so. All right, Dr. Garrison?”
He added the last bit to remind her who she was, Hannah thought. Dr. Hannah Garrison knew how things were done. She knew what logic dictated. She knew how to keep her composure and her objectivity. She was strong and levelheaded, cool under fire. But she had ceased to be Dr. Hannah Garrison. Now she was Josh's mom, terrified of what her child must have gone through, sick at heart, racked by guilt.
“How's that sound, Josh?” Ulrich asked. “You get to sleep in one of those cool electric hospital beds with the remote controls, and your mom will be right there in the room with you. What do you think about that?”
Josh pushed his face into his mother's shoulder and hugged her tighter. He didn't want to think at all.
Ellen paced the confines of the waiting room like an expectant aunt.
Marty Wilhelm, the agent the BCA had sent down from St. Paul to replace Megan, sat on the couch, flicking through cable channels with the remote, seemingly mesmerized by the changing colors and images. He looked young and stupid. Tom Hanks without the brain. Too cute, with a short nose and a mop of curly brown hair.
Ellen had taken an instant dislike to him, then chastised herself for it. It wasn't Wilhelm's fault that Paige Price had decided to play dirty and turn the media's attentions on Megan and Mitch's budding relationship. Nor was it Marty's fault Megan had a hot Irish temper and a tongue that was too sharp and too quick for prudence. That Megan had become a public-relations problem which had outweighed her value as a cop had nothing to do with Marty.
All those issues considered, she still disliked him.
He glanced up at her with eyes as brown and vacuous as a spaniel's and said for the ninth time, “It's taking them long enough.”
She gave him the same look she had given thick-headed boys in high school and kept on pacing.
The only other person in the waiting area, Father Tom McCoy, rose from a square armchair that was too low for him and stretched a kink out of his back. Having grown up Episcopalian, Ellen knew him only in passing and by reputation. Barry Fitzgerald he was not. Tom McCoy was tall and handsome with an athlete's build and kind blue eyes behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He had come to the hospital w
earing faded blue jeans and a flannel shirt that gave him more resemblance to a lumberjack than a priest.
He gave Ellen a questioning look as he fished some change out of his pocket. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks, Father. I've had too much already.”
“Me, too,” he admitted. “What I really need is a drink, but I don't think the cafeteria has a machine that dispenses good Irish whiskey.”
As McCoy walked away, Wilhelm cocked his head. “He's not like any priest I ever knew. Where's his collar?”
Ellen gave him The Look again. “Father Tom is a nonconformist.”
“So I gathered. What did you think of his deacon—Albert Fletcher?”
“I didn't know Albert Fletcher. Obviously, he was a very disturbed individual.”
Fletcher had fallen under suspicion regarding the kidnapping because of his ties to Josh through the Church as Josh's instructor for religion class and as an altar boy. Obsessed with the Church, Fletcher had crossed the line from zealot to madman, unnoticed until he'd attacked Father Tom and Hannah early Friday morning as they'd sat talking in St. Elysius Catholic Church. He had given Father Tom a concussion with a brass candlestick. Later that morning the mummified remains of Fletcher's long-dead wife had been discovered in his garage. The incident had sparked a manhunt that had ended in tragedy during Saturday evening Mass, where Fletcher, ranting and wild-eyed, had fallen to his death from the balcony railing. Whether or not there would be further investigation into Doris Fletcher's demise had yet to be determined.
So much that was bad had happened in so little time. Kidnapping, suicide, madness, scandal. It seemed as if a hidden seam in the fabric of life had given way, allowing evil to pour into Deer Lake from some dark underworld. And if they didn't figure out how to close it up, it would continue on, poisoning everything and everyone it touched. The thought gave Ellen a chill.
The hospital was quiet, the halls dimly lit. Word of Josh's return had gone out on a need-to-know basis. What staff was on duty at this time of night hovered around the main desk, talking in low tones and casting worried glances down the hall toward the examination room Hannah and Josh had disappeared into with Mitch and Dr. Ulrich.