Текст книги "The Survivors Club"

Автор книги: J. Black

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

CHAPTER 31

It wasn’t until Jaimie was up drinking tomato juice (she swore by it for a hangover if there wasn’t any menudoaround) and squinting at the car coming down the hill—Marisue Jennrette’s Armada—that she realized she hadn’t canceled lessons for today.

Shit.

Felt like a crushed box in the road. But she went out anyway, squinting against the harsh sunlight, and met Marisue and her daughter as they were getting out.

Shielding her eyes against the glare, her brain throbbing in her skull, Jaimie said, “I can’t teach today. I’m sorry.”

“What?” said Marisue. Like she’d been told the sky was falling. She always was a bitch.

“I’m sorry, but my brother died. I’m just getting ready to go to his funeral,” she lied.

“Michael?”

“No, Chad.”

“Chad? Why didn’t you call me? It’s fifteen miles to get here, and I’ve got a lot to do today. I’m working on the flower committee at the Chamber of Commerce!”

God, her head! Jaimie pressed a thumb into her left temple. “I’m sorry. But it’s just this once. My brother, you know? My brother is dead.”

“Fine.”

The woman said it the way Jaimie always said it, the way women said it to men. If that’s the way it’s going to be, fine. Just fine. And by the way, fuck you.

Well fuck you, too,she thought.

After Marisue and her chunky untalented daughter drove off the property, Jaimie walked back toward the house.

Her dogs followed her up onto the steps. They milled around while she opened the door. They stood there, chastened, while she told them to stay outside.

She went to bed. She slept. When she woke up, it was early afternoon. She heard rocks pop off car tires—someone elsecoming. She hoped it wasn’t Michael. Or Brayden. She wasn’t up to that today. She just wanted everything about what happened in Laguna Beach to just fricking go away.

She got up, not bothering about her wrinkled clothes, her tank top and jeans. It was a truck like any other around here, a white Ford. But she didn’t know this particular one.

She opened the door and the dogs milled around.

The two little terriers, the black lab. The two mutts, one of them spotted. The coon hound.

The truck bumped along the road toward her.

Six dogs, not seven. Jaimie was missing the familiar blue-gray, white, and black—her prize.

Her consolation prize.

Adele was missing.

The guy was just a guy, looking at various pieces of land around here. He asked her if she knew of any. “Just a couple of acres, kind of like a homestead,” he said. He had an open, friendly face. Straw cowboy hat. Jeans, denim shirt. Your average middle-aged guy who maybe grew up rural and now wanted a small place of his own in God’s country. She’d met a million like him. He was way too old for her. But she wasn’t thinking about sex right now. Just get rid of him. Adele was missing. She had to be around here somewhere. But she could be hurt. Not like her not to come when she was called.

Jaimie scanned the yard as he talked, bending her ear with useless babble. On and on and on, as if he enjoyed boring her to death. When all she wanted to do was find Adele. She tuned him out, her eyes searching the grassland, hoping to see some light blue and black and white. Looking for Adele. Maybe she was in the barn. Maybe…

She wished the guy would just get in his fucking truck and go.

He didn’t seem to get the hint. She told him about a place up the road where she’d seen a FOR SALE sign. Just go, already.

Finally he did. In the truck, he honked the horn once and gave her a salute.

Jaimie barely noticed. She was too busy looking for her dog.

Tess was now certain that the lion was purchased to kill Farley. The name on the credit card was made up, but DeKoven had been too cute about it. She looked up the word “Dom” in an online dictionary. “Dominus” meant “lord.” And Derring. She knew that “derring” was part of the term “derring-do.” Her mother had used that term all the time. It meant, basically, doing something that was daring. So it could be that Michael was saying he was superior to others—a lord—and he was, at least in terms of wealth and privilege. Michael was the scion of a wealthy and important family. And he would certainly think of himself as having plenty of “derring-do.”

Old-fashioned term for a young guy.

Derring-do—maybe it was an expression he learned from his mother or father. It took a whole hell of a lot of derring-do to go around the country killing people because you thought you could get away with it.

She wondered where the animal was now. If he had been in the cage with Farley, if he had been driven out of hunger to eat Farley, then there could be evidence somewhere.

The cage was the most likely piece of evidence left.

But how to find it? Michael DeKoven had money and means to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do.

He could have killed the mountain lion and buried him. He could have destroyed the lion cage. Break it up for kindling. Burn it. Melt down the bars. Leave it in a landfill, or push it down a mountain. Plenty of places to do that. There were infinite ways he could dispose of the evidence.

Trying to find the cage, trying to find the mountain lion—that would be like looking for the needle in the haystack. There was so much open county. Forest land. Canyons and washes out in the boonies. Junkyards. Trash heaps.

The lion was gone. The cage was gone. Tess knew it.

She was convinced now that DeKoven was killing people who had previously escaped death. People who should have died, but lived instead.

If it was a game, it was a rich kid’s game. Michael was in his midthirties, but Tess thought of him as a kid. Look at his toys. Look at that car, the Fisker Karma. Look at those expensive paintings. She thought of Jaimie as a kid, too. The two of them in it together?

That left the second-youngest, the girl. Brayden.

And Chad in Laguna.

Could all four of them be involved?

What were the odds of that?

Four siblings, in it together? She grouped them by age. Michael and Jaimie were closest, at thirty-five and thirty-four. Then came Chad at thirty-two—two years’ difference between Jaimie and Chad, and three years’ difference between Michael and Chad. From Chad to Brayden, the youngest, it was three years. Which made Brayden five years younger than Jaimie and six years younger than Michael.

Six years’ difference in age might make a difference. Michael might not have included Brayden in this.

Tess hadn’t met Brayden. She hadn’t met Chad, either.

She wondered which one of the family had tagged Alec Sheppard on top of the Hilton Atlanta.

CHAPTER 32

Tess collected her bag at the Tucson International Airport carousel and walked out to her car. She saw she had a message from Alec Sheppard. She punched in his number as she walked.

“Mr. Sheppard? I thought when people sat across from each other at a picnic table and listened to a band called the Blasphemers, we could at least call each other by our first names.”

“I’m ever the professional.”

“No doubt in my mind. I haven’t heard from anybody and wanted to know if there was a—what do you call it in cop lingo? Break in the case? Anything on Steve Barkman?”

“Nothing yet.” She wasn’t about to tell him about the micro disc. “I plan to talk to Detective Tedesco later today. Are you still in town?”

“As a matter of fact I am. I’m looking at houses.”

“Houses?”

“I’m thinking of relocating.”

“Relocating?”

“You know, as in moving here. To Tucson.”

“Why?”

“I like it here, and I don’t need to live in Houston…you have a problem with that? Me being in your jurisdiction?”

“Technically, you’d be in Cheryl Tedesco’s jurisdiction. So what kind of place are you looking for?”

“When I was a college student, I thought it would be pretty cool to live in one of those neighborhoods with the old houses, like the ones in Encanto. So I’m standing in front of this pink adobe pueblo-style monstrosity and I was wondering if you’d give me advice, since you’re a local. Wait, let me send you a picture of it.”

Tess’s heart sped up. She cleared her throat. “That’s not necessary. I’m here in Tucson. I could meet you there.”

Tess drove north on Palo Verde and ended up twenty minutes later outside a very pink house surrounded by desert on a street in a neighborhood called Colonia Solana.

Alec Sheppard was waiting by his rental car.

He looked good.

He was a good-looking man.

She liked Alec Sheppard. In fact, she liked him a lot.

They toured that house and two others. One was in the foothills. The sun was starting to get low. “We could have dinner,” Alec said.

Tess opened her mouth to say she had to get back. Instead, she excused herself and went outside to call Bonny’s extension. It was late and he was already gone. She left a long message detailing what had transpired in California. She sent photos from her phone of the area where Peter Farley had been buried by the mountain pool. She sent photos of the animal sanctuary.

Then she went to dinner with Alec Sheppard. The food was good. The conversation, better. However much she liked him the first time they went out together, she liked him even more now.

She went up to his room for a nightcap.

Not advisable. She knew she was letting herself in for big trouble. He was too attractive, too decent, too nice, too smart, too good a man for it not to cause a major wrinkle in her life, but it was all operations go from the moment they stepped inside. She wanted him and he obviously wanted her. It started to get warm and then hot, and Tess realized she was equal parts attracted to Alec Sheppard and angry with Max.

It was hard to stop. Like a pilot trying to pull a plane out of a dive. He wasn’t just a good kisser, but a good toucher, a good hugger, a good feeler, and she was getting to the point—quickly—where she would not be able to stop.

She might be there now.

They were more urgent now, lips, mouths, tongues, hands, hips, molding each other into an approximation of the act but with clothing between them—it was impossible.

They tangled on the bed. She unbuttoned his shirt. She ran her fingers down his chest and then below that. He was doing plenty of research on his own. It seemed physically impossible to break away.

Too late…too late.

But there was Max.

Maybe she and Max were over, but she couldn’t do it this way.

She managed to pull away. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done.

She said, “I’m in a relationship.”

Alec looked at her. His face was a mirror of hers. Not shock exactly. He wasn’t bereft, or brokenhearted, or disappointed. More like the rug had been pulled out from under him and he’d hit the ground flat on his chin.

She felt the same way.

He sat up, rubbed his neck. Looked away.

“I’m in a relationship,” Tess said. “It’s…problematic.” Then she added in a rush of words, “I can’t add to that, to our troubles. I have to…I have to think about it and I have to figure out if I want to stay with him.”

She was aware that she sounded like she was pleading.

He sat still beside her. He blew air out of his lips. Looked into the middle distance and then down at his hands.

A good-looking man.

A man she liked being around.

A man she could maybe, possibly, fall in love with.

But she wasn’t going to do it this way. “I’m sorry, Alec.”

“I know.”

She managed to pull herself together. Uncrimp and straighten her clothes. Tell her body to stop screaming at the top of its horny little lungs.

She heard herself say, “I want to keep in touch.”

Then she bolted out into the chilly spring night.

Wondering just how much more she could screw up her life.

As Tess headed for her car, her phone chimed. It was Barry Zudowsky.

“I got a sketch artist with Frieda Nussman today. I’m going to send you a photo of her sketch.”

“Do you have a name?”

“No. Let me send it to you.”

He disconnected. Tess knew he was done.

A few moments later she was staring into the face of the man who had purchased the mountain lion.

She’d seen the face before—twice. In the first picture she’d seen of him, he’d been thirteen years old, standing at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a water treatment plant. He’d lost the baby fat he’d had as a child but had retained the passivity in his expression. She recalled the more recent version of him from the family portrait in Tucson Lifestyle.

As a young man, his mane of blond hair was streaked with white from hours, days, months, and years of the surfing life in California. His face had become more angular and was deeply tanned. Chad DeKoven was a true boy of summer.

He was also a gamer like his brother, Michael, and his sister Jaimie.

He was part of it.

Tess looked for an address for DeKoven. He lived in Laguna Beach. She was able to access the DMV files, and this in turn yielded his phone number.

She sat in the car and considered how she would approach him. If he was a killer as she suspected, he would stonewall her. She knew she would only tip him off if she approached him head-on. She knew she’d need to do an end run around his defenses, run a game on him, but right now she couldn’t think of anything. So she decided to call and see if he was there. She used her home phone to punch in his number.

A canned message sounded. Chad DeKoven’s phone had been disconnected.

There was one person she hadn’t yet talked to, other than Chad—Brayden DeKoven McConnell.

CHAPTER 33

Brayden McConnell lived in a very nice townhouse in Ventana Canyon at the foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains.

The first thing Tess noticed was a wood gilt-edged sign beside the door said, “Brayden McConnell, Real Estate Law.”

She rang the lighted bell.

No answer. She tried again. Nothing. She was walking back to the car when Brayden answered.

Brayden’s hair was pulled up messily in a clip. She wore a sweatshirt and purple drawstring velveteen sweatpants, none too clean. But she was pretty in a plain, sweet way. She looked nothing like the whippet-thin Jaimie or comic-book-hero-handsome Michael.

She kept the door between them, her pale eyes wide, sad, and frightened at the same time.

“Oh, I thought you were the babysitter.” She started to close the heavy door. Tess was practiced at putting her foot between the door and the jamb. Thinking: you’re going out like that? “Just a couple of questions, I’m a detective with Santa Cruz County.” She nodded to the shield clipped to her belt.

“This is Pima County.”

“I’d like to talk to you anyway. I can come back with a TPD detective if you’d like, or we can go to TPD midtown.”

“Might as well. “ She opened the door and led the way inside.

Tess pulled the door shut behind her.

Nice place, expensive furnishings, but sparse. Tess knew Brayden was divorced. It looked like someone had taken half of everything.

Her little girl, Aurora, was shy at first. They sat on a couple of sofas, and Aurora warmed up quickly, showing her dance steps and eventually building up to running around them shrieking, and alternately crawling onto Tess’s lap.

“I’d like to ask you about your brother, Chad.”

“Isn’t that a little soon?”

“Soon?”

Brayden played with her hair clip, kept poking stray strands of hair into her chignon or whatever it was. “My brother Chad was a really good guy. A sweetheart. That’s all you need to know.”

Something off, here. Brayden sounded defiant. She’d said “was” a good guy. Tess summoned up the photo of the artist sketch on her phone. “Do you recognize him?”

Brayden stared open-mouthed at the sketch. Then she started to whimper. “He just died,” Brayden said. “Can’t you leave it alone for a littlewhile?”

Then Aurora chimed in. She clung to her mother and started to wail.

Tess was shocked. That was why Chad’s phone was disconnected. “When did this happen?”

“I don’t think I should talk to you—it’s personal.”

“Brayden, the sketch I showed you links him to a homicide in Orange County,” Tess lied. It merely linked him to an animal that might have been used in one. But Tess needed the upper hand now.

“What do you wantfrom me? I don’t care and I think you should go and leave us alone. We just had a long airplane ride and Aurora’s having nightmares and she’s breaking out! She has pimples! She’s sick to her stomach and it isn’t fair, so why are you here? You’re harassing us and it’s just plain mean and I’m sorry, I’m really really sorry, excuseme, but you should come back tomorrow or maybe go harass Michael because I don’t know anything and my daughter’s stomach needs to be settled!”

The kid was shrieking. Brayden kept on talking, none of it making sense. Just a barrage of words, throwing them at Tess like weapons. At first Tess thought the woman really was in shock, but it soon occurred to her that Brayden was able to avoid specifics by babbling. Her voice was so low even as she said paranoid and angry things, and Aurora’s voice was so loud. It was like trying to listen to a babbling stream under a band saw.

It occurred to Tess that they were a good team. Brayden was stonewalling her. Brayden babbling and Aurora crying: a one-two punch.

Fracturing Tess’s concentration. “Can you tell me how Chad died?”

“Why are you such a ghoul? Why do you care? He’s dead, not that you or anyone else cares anything about him.” She paused. “All right, Miss Ghoul. You want to know? Somebody murdered him! Someone killed my brother.”

“Can you tell me—”

She looked into Tess’s eyes. “I don’t know anything, except that somebody killed him. He was just going surfing, he was just a harmless adult kid, and somebody just throttled him and left him out there like they’d throw away a Dixie cup—like so much trash!”

Tess waited for the crying to subside. Either Brayden was suffering from histrionic personality disorder, or she was using the drama to stave off questions. And the daughter took her cues from the mother.

Tess held out the sketch again. “Is this Chad?”

Brayden stopped sobbing and looked. “It doesn’t even looklike him. But he wouldn’t do anything to hurt anyone. If you think he’s involved in anything bad like that, you’re barking up the wrong tree, and I’m not saying anything more.”

“Bad like what?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “You’re with the police. You wouldn’t be showing me his picture if you were planning to give him the Surfer Dude of the Year Award.”

“Do you know Steve Barkman?”

“ Who?”

Tess showed her a photo of Steve Barkman.

“No. Who’s he?”

“You don’t know who he is?”

“I might have heard the name. But I don’t know where. Why are you torturing me like this? I just lost my brother.”

“So you never met this man?”

“No.”

Tess reminded herself Brayden was a lawyer. And apparently a damn good one.

“Do you know a man named Alec Sheppard?”

“ Anotherone? Who areall these people? No I don’t know him!”

“Alec Sheppard. Are you sure you’ve never heard that name? Maybe when you were in Atlanta?”

Brayden McConnell looked at her as if she were nuts. “Atlanta. Next I suppose you’re going to say I live on the North Pole. You come in here asking me all this crap when I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Well here’s something Iwant to know. If you’re going to keep asking me stuff, why don’t you tell me what it’s all about? And why don’t you use your pull with Laguna Beach PD to get some answers?” Brayden pulled her daughter onto her lap and held her as if she were afraid Tess would grab her any minute.

Tess knew when she was being sandbagged.

Time to give up—for now. Tess stood. “Thank you for your time.”

“No problem.”

Seriously?

Tess was relieved when the door closed behind her—and glad to get out from under.

Score one for Brayden DeKoven McConnell and her daughter, Aurora.

Lawyers of the year.

Tess positioned herself about seven homes up the street, backing the SUV into a driveway and killing her lights. A large palo verde tree partially screened her. There was only one way out of the neighborhood.

She waited.

A half hour went by. She did not hear a garage door roll up. She did not see taillights back out. No car came by. Another hour. Same thing. She waited another half hour. Nobody drove into the neighborhood.

Brayden wasn’t going anywhere. She had not been spooked.

Tess started up the engine, put the car in gear, and headed down out of Tucson to the freeway toward home.

She felt as if she’d been put through the wringer. She had a bad feeling about Brayden. Not just that she was good at barrage tactics, but because there was one moment when Tess sensed something besides just good tactics.

Tess had kept her eyes on Brayden’s face every moment. She was distracted by the little girl, she had a hard time following the line of bullshit Brayden was handing her, but she never once took her eyes away from that sweet face and those big little-girl eyes.

And there was one moment when the mask slipped.

Some well-turned phrase, maybe. She’d seen it—raw triumph.

As if Brayden, behind her sweet little-girl exterior, behind the shocked and grieving sister, was playing her.