Текст книги "The Survivors Club"

Автор книги: J. Black

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“How did you think that could possibly work?”

“Michael, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your new dog. The Aussie mix.”

“So? I like dogs. I’ve got plenty of them.”

“You know what I mean.”

Silence.

“Why did you do it?”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you. Maybe I just want to do something goodfor a change. She’s a nice dog. She needed a home—a good home. That was the least I could do.”

“What do you mean, the least you could do?”

Silence.

“Jaimie?”

“This is so fucked.”

“What’s fucked?”

“You know. You know exactly what I mean.”

“Are you having regrets, Jaimie? Because as I recall, you didn’t seem to mind what happened at Huka Falls. In fact, you had the time of your life.”

Silence.

“You do not want to even think about screwing with me, Jaimie. I don’t want you messing things up with the games you play.”

“The games Iplay? What about you? What about Houston? What about Alec Sheppard? You’re the one inviting trouble.”

“Why’d you take that man’s dog?”

“I wanted to. Okay? I wanted… somethingout of it.”

“We come to the meat of the conversation at last.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“What did you do, Jaimie?”

“I didn’t do anything!”

He had to be careful. That’s why he used the landline, not his cell. Heaven only knew what they could do with cell phones. He lowered his voice. “You didn’t jump the gun?”

“What are you talking about?”

He was ninety-nine percent sure nobody was monitoring this call—he’d done a sweep this morning, but still, you never knew. He said carefully, “Was it you?”

“Was it me what?”

“Try to keep up, okay? You took the dog. We all know how impulsive you are—”

She exploded. “ I’mimpulsive? Look what you did in Houston! You know, Michael? Before you lecture me, you’d better take a look at yourself first. You’d better take your own damn advice!”

“What aboutSteve Barkman?”

“What about Steve Barkman?”

He kept his voice steady, even though he was angry. “I want to know how far you’ve gone off the reservation.”

“ Me?What about you?”

“I’m asking you to tell me what else you’ve done. Did he approach you?” He almost said, “Did he blackmail you?” but stopped himself just in time.

There was a pause. Then Jaimie said, “Fuck you, Michael! Just…fuck you!”

And she hung up.

Michael sat there, hearing only the dial tone.

His heart thudded in his ears. His mouth went dry. What did Jaimie do?

Whatever it was, however deep she was into this, she wasn’t about to tell him. He hit End, planning to call her back, but the phone rang before he could punch in her number.

“Look, Jaimie—”

It wasn’t Jaimie. It was Brayden, his little sister. And she was crying.

He asked her what was wrong, but she was sobbing too hard for him to understand what she was saying.

At first.

CHAPTER 22

Tess turned onto Spanish Trail headed for the freeway. Her mind wasn’t on Michael DeKoven. It was on Alec Sheppard.

There was a spark there. She didn’t like to think about that.

She loved Max.

But the simple fact was, Max lived in California. She could relocate to California, but she couldn’t relocate to the world Max lived in. She couldn’t fit inside the bubble of his celebrity.

Her life was here. She worked homicide and it was part of the fabric that made her. Her identity as a homicide cop went far back. It went way back to her childhood, when her closest friend was kidnapped and a big, strong, gentle man had helped her through. His name was Detective Joe Clayborn, and he’d promised her he would find her best friend, and after he did—after he found Emily’s body—Joe Clayborn promised her he would find her killer and put him away.

He found him.

He found the neighbor kid before he could kill again.

Tess couldn’t live inside Max’s bubble. He would argue that she could do what she wanted, could pursue her own career. But she knew she’d be caught up in it—all of it, the tabloids and the fanzines and the paparazzi—and she didn’t want that kind of life. She wouldn’t be able to ply her trade there. Cops were insular and they kept to their own circles, and she wouldn’t fit in. She wouldn’t be effective. She would be an outsider.

It was hard enough here, with Danny teasing her all the time.

So she didn’t know what to do.

She was attracted to Alec Sheppard, but it was only because she wasn’t spending every day with Max, day after day, week after week, month after month. Absence didn’t make the heart grow fonder. It made you forget.

If she and Max had any shot at all, they needed to be together.

And that was a bridge too far—for both of them.

Sometimes she woke in the middle of the night and a voice screamed inside her head: What are you doing?

But she couldn’t cut the tie. Couldn’t. Not yet—

That was when Tess felt it—a piece falling into place.

Up ahead was the little general store in Rincon Valley. She pulled off the road and parked.

There were two reasons to stop at the store. One, she needed chocolate—dark chocolate, preferably—which she knew helped her think. And two, she might have to make more phone calls, and she didn’t want to do that while she was driving.

Inside the store, Tess bought a Dove Bar, her hands fumbling as she pulled the debit card from her purse.

When something happened in a case, she always felt she was on the edge of something big. Tremendous. Sometimes, too big for her to assimilate.

She felt like that now.

The woman at the cash register had long blonde hair and looked like she was a couple of years out of Rodeo Queen range. She said, “Are you okay?”

“I’m good.”

She walked out of the store and into the parking lot and out toward the back. There were corrals behind the store, and horses. This was a nice little spot, the Rincon Mountains rising up to the east, their golden flanks shadowed navy blue by clouds that seemed to wander over the mountain like a herd of buffalo.

The air smelled rural, like her place on Harshaw Road. The horses were at their feed tub at the far end of a pasture, their tails swishing. She could hear them stomping and banging their noses against the feed tub—sound traveled out here. It reminded her of Jaimie Wolfe and her equestrian center, and she wondered if Jaimie was part of the narrative she was building, too.

She punched in Alec Sheppard’s number and he answered on the first ring.

“You said something I didn’t quite get,” Tess said without preamble. “What did you mean when you said you were ‘getting in shape after the accident?’”

“Oh, that. I got busted up pretty bad in Florida.”

He sounded embarrassed.

“What happened?”

“I had what they call a partial malfunction. My reserve canopy tangled with the main canopy, and neither of them inflated. Do you know what terminal velocity means?”

“No.” Tess’s eye followed an old ranch truck—seventies vintage—pulling into the lot. Sunlight arrowed off the bumper and she shaded her eyes. When the engine shut off she smelled gas.

Sheppard said, “It’s an equation. People fall at different rates. If you weigh more, you fall faster. There are a lot of conditions that can change your velocity. In my case, the canopy was a mess but it did slow me down. Because the two of them were wadded up together, they created even more drag—that got me down to sixty or seventy miles per hour. I got lucky. Really lucky. I thought I was dead.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing much I could do. I tried to make like a flying squirrel and hope for the best. That was probably what saved me—pure luck I landed the way I wanted to. When I hit, my entire body absorbed the impact. If I’d gone in headfirst or hit with my feet, I would have accordioned, and that could have killed me. At the very least I’d have serious internal injuries.

“That’s a dangerous sport.”

He actually laughed. “I made one hell of an impression—literally—went in six, seven inches down in the bog. Just smushed into it—the mud got into my eyes, my nose, my mouth, I was this close to drowning. Thank God someone got to me in time to pull me out. Even so, the wind was knocked out of me and my heart stopped. I broke my ribs, collarbone, fractured my pelvis—”

“You survived all that?”

“I was lucky someone was there to give me CPR.”

“You could have been killed.”

“I wasdead, for a very short period of time.”

Tess felt the tingle low in her abdomen. She had always—literally—felt with her gut. When she was getting close, when everything came together or was about to…

“You should go with me sometime,” Alec Sheppard said. Tess barely heard him. There was a buzzing in her ears. She saw the burned and crushed frame of the Spokane Indians’ bus—a photograph that had accompanied the article.

“Lucky Lohrke,” she said.

“Who?”

“Just a guy. Look, I’ve got to go. Can we talk later?”

“Sure.”

Tess knew he sounded a little put off, but that didn’t matter. She loved Max.

Scratch that. She was in love with Max.

She walked back to her car.

Tess turned onto the freeway going west. Thinking about DeKoven.

Not Michael DeKoven.

Quentin DeKoven.

She could see it on the page, as she had a few days ago.

“In 1999, Quentin DeKoven was the lone survivor of a single-engine plane crash in northern Arizona. After dragging the dying pilot nearly three miles through rugged country and spending the night in frigid temperatures, DeKoven was found by the search team, nearly dead from exposure.

“He lost two fingers on one hand and a foot to frostbite.”

She saw the words. She remembered the sun beaming down on the page. She knew what she was wearing, knew the side street she’d pulled into, knew the time of day.

“In a cruel twist of fate, Quentin DeKoven died in 2005 when his private plane abruptly lost altitude and crashed into a wilderness area in the Pinaleño Mountains, six years after he survived a similar incident in 1999.”

Quentin DeKoven had survived a private plane crash that should have killed him.

Six years later, he’d died in another.

He wasn’t the only one who’d dodged the Reaper.

Tess flashed on Steve Barkman’s self-satisfied grin. The cat-that-ate-the-canary grin when he asked her about George Hanley’s death.

How many times was he shot?

The question hadn’t made any sense when he’d asked it. Why was he obsessed with the number of shots?

Now she knew: George Hanley was shot six times the first time he died. Yes—died. His daughter Pat had told her he “died on the operating table.” He’d died and been revived.

There were similarities.

That first morning, waking up, Tess had thought of that baseball player in the magazine, Lucky Lohrke. Lucky Lohrke, who was bumped off a flight back to the States at the end of World War II. Lucky Lohrke, who was traded to another team and got off the bus before it crashed and burned on a snowy mountain.

Lucky.

George Hanley had been lucky. He’d survived death on the operating table.

Later, he won the lottery.

But after that, all these years later, his luck had run out.

She called Danny. “Remember the DVD George Hanley had in his apartment? You found it, the second pass through?”

“ The Ultimate Survivorshow.”

“That’s it. The show he was featured on.”

“Yeah, the one that’s on the History Channel.”

“Have you watched it yet?”

“Yeah, I watched it the other day. It was kind of hokey. You know how they have to catch people up with the story after the commercials, just in case somebody new is watching?”

“Repetitive, I know,” Tess said. “When did the show air?”

“I’ll have to go look at my notes. Call you back.”

Ten minutes later, he did.

“It was last season.”

“What month?”

“November. Why?”

“I’ve got a theory, but that’s all it is.”

“Care to share?”

“I will after I look into it some more. Right now it’s just a wild hare.”

“Hey. Shoot it, skin it, put it in the pot with some moleand let’s have a feast.”

Tess saw Steve Barkman again, his head through the coffee table. The man who had blazed the trail for her.

He’d been investigating Michael DeKoven.

She had three men here: George Hanley, Alec Sheppard, and the patriarch of the DeKoven family, Quentin DeKoven.

Quentin DeKoven survived a plane crash in 1999.

Quentin DeKoven died in another plane crash in 2005.

Alec Sheppard’s parachute failed in Florida a year and a half ago.

Alec Sheppard’s parachute failed in Houston in March 2013.

George Hanley was shot in Phoenix in 1991.

George Hanley was shot to death in Credo in April 2013.

Only Alec Sheppard survived, and that was because he had help.

In all of these cases, there was one common denominator.

Michael DeKoven.

CHAPTER 23

Jaimie Wolfe’s place was buttoned up. There were no little girls on big horses prancing around the ring. Jaimie’s Dodge Ram was gone. The only vehicle on the property was the old ranch truck.

Tess heard a vehicle slow down on the road and turn in, rumbling over the cattle guard but hidden by a copse of trees near the entrance. Tess watched as the truck appeared, shadows from the trees scrolling over the hood.

A Ford—not Jaimie’s Dodge Ram—a recent-model Ford F-350. If it wasn’t covered up past the wheel-wells in mud, the truck would be white—typical for working trucks in Arizona.

White deflected the heat.

The driver was thick-bodied but not fat and looked to be in his early fifties. He wore jeans, boots, and a snap-button long-sleeved shirt. Pink face, sun-peeled nose, aviator sunglasses, straw Stetson.

Rancher.

“Hey,” the man called out, slamming the door of his truck and walking toward her. “You a friend of Jaimie’s?”

Tess introduced herself and asked who he was. He hitched his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans, framing his rodeo belt buckle, and breathed in the spring air. Taking stock of the place with a country smile. “Names’s Barnes,” he said, “Dave Barnes.” He shook her hand with his big mitt. He wore a Super Bowl–type ring that would have dwarfed another man’s hand. “Jaimie asked me to look after her livestock while she was gone.”

“Gone? Do you know where?”

He screwed up his face. “Didn’t say. Just took off—I gather she was in a hurry and she wanted me to feed the livestock. So you’re with Santa Cruz County?” He added, spotting the shield on her belt. “Nobody broke in here, did they?”

“Not that I know of.”

He strolled over to Jaimie’s porch. “Jaimie’s a little slack on security. I told her that. She leaves her key right here.” He lifted a plant in a pot on the porch and picked up a set of keys in the saucer underneath. Opened the door to wagging tails and slavering tongues. “Hey there!” he said as the dogs funneled out of the house.

Adele was among them.

“You want to come in?”

“No, thanks,” Tess said. She would need a warrant if she did—and who knew what might happen down the road. She didn’t want to hurt a potential criminal case because of the “fruit of the poisoned tree.” But she did peer around him at the inside. It looked the same as it did the last time she was here.

“Jaimie has business with the law?” the man asked.

“I wanted to talk to her. Are you a member of SABEL by any chance?”

“SABEL? Nah. That’s a little too environmentalist for me.” He scratched his neck. “You think that they’re doin’ any good? Seems like a hopeless cause to me. There’s just too damn much of that g.d. grass.”

“Did you ever meet a friend of hers named George Hanley?”

He thought about it. “Nope, don’t believe I had the pleasure. Who’s George Hanley?”

“He also belonged to SABEL. Did you hear about the man killed down Credo?”

“Old guy got himself shot up?”

“That’s the one.”

He looked down and kicked at a clod of dirt. “A real shame. Heard it was illegals or cartels—damn, it’s getting so bad. Shooting people up and cutting heads off and burning folks…I sure do hope he rests in peace.”

“How would you describe Jaimie Wolfe?”

“Let’s see…one hot babe.” He grinned. “Not that she’d notice me. Good on a horse. Like a horse whisperer, you heard of them? She’s always been nice to me.”

“Would you mind giving me your contact information, just in case I can think of anything else to ask?”

He said, “This Hanley guy who died in Credo, you think Jaimiehad anything to do with that?”

“Doubtful,” Tess lied. “I’m just talking to anyone who knew him.”

“Tell you what. Give me your card, and if I hear somethin’, I’ll give you a call.”

She did so, scrawling her home phone number as well.

Tess drove up by the road and parked. She’d turned on her laptop, and looked for tire treads that matched what she’d seen—just in case Jaimie had been to Barkman’s house. Then she started up the Tahoe and put it in gear, turning east on 82. A glance in her rearview mirror showed the white Ford belonging to Jaimie’s friend driving off the ranch and turning in the opposite direction.

Her mobile rang. It was Cheryl Tedesco.

“One of our techs found something interesting at Barkman’s place,” she said. “You remember that printer he had with all those slots for micro cards?”

Tess listened while Cheryl explained that Steve Barkman had hidden a micro SD card in plain sight.

“I remember a tech mentioning something about it at the scene. What exactly isa micro SD card?”

“A storage device. It’s tiny, but apparently, it packs a lot of gigabytes on it—actually terabytes. My tech tells me that one terabyte holds one thousand gigabytes.”

Tess would be impressed if she knew precisely what a gigabyte was. “Computer memory.”

“Uh-huh. He told me, no wonder they didn’t find anything on his laptop except a bunch of bookmarked web pages, Facebook, and other crap. He must have kept it all on the card.”

“Where did your tech find it?”

“First, you gotta understand how close it came to being thrown out. It was in that jar of pens and pencils on his bookcase. But fortunately, our guys are scrupulous in looking for and bagging evidence. You know how big a micro SD is?”

“Small?” Tess guessed.

“Try a little black rectangle you can put on the tip of your finger.”

“You think there will be a lot of info on Michael DeKoven?”

“That’s the hope.”

“How far along are you?”

“Well, it’s on the tip of my finger right now. I’ll keep you posted.”

CHAPTER 24

Michael, Jaimie, and Brayden said little on the flight over. Michael rented a Town Car at LAX and drove down to Laguna Beach.

No one talked.

Michael sat still, staring at the traffic but not seeing it. Stunned.

Chad.

His brother.

His little brother.

Chad was kind of a nonentity. He’d never progressed in any way—not in school, not in a career, not even in his social life. He was an overgrown, carefree child. Their mother used to call him an innocent.

Not that he was dumb. He wasn’t. Maybe all the pot he smoked and the beer and the fast food he consumed contributed to his…haziness, but he’d carved out his own little life in the Laguna beach house and he wasn’t a bother to anybody. They could just forget about him and go on with their lives.

Michael felt guilty. He should have paid more attention. They just left him out there on his own, thinking he was fine. Happy. But he must have run across some bad people. As head of the family, Michael felt responsible.

They checked into the Retreat at Laguna, then drove to the Laguna Police Department on Loma. It took Michael a while to find a parking space and they were late. They waited in the outside office until a detective came to meet with them. He was tall and Hispanic, with a pitted face and bad breath. His name was Pete Morales. He took them back to his office.

He didn’t talk long. They would have to go identify the body at the hospital morgue, and there was very little he could tell them.

“It looks like he was going surfing. His neighbor says he usually goes out between four and five-thirty in the morning. He was found just below the steps down to the beach by a couple of surfers—” he read their names. “They must have found him shortly after he was killed.”

Michael absorbed this. “Do you have any leads? Who do you think would do something like this?” Aware of Brayden sitting beside him, her hand on his arm, stroking over and over, as if she were in a trance.

Jaimie asked, “How was he killed?”

“He was choked.”

“Strangled?” asked Brayden.

Morales shifted in his seat. Michael noticed his pants were polyester. You’d think cops in Laguna Beach would dress better. “Yes.”

Brayden continued to paw at Michael’s arm. “Why would someone do that?”

“There could be a few reasons. An argument, maybe. Or a robbery, although no one took his board.”

Michael reflected that while Chad had few needs or even wants, he spent his money on surfboards. “So it wasn’t robbery then?”

“It doesn’t look that way, but I can’t be sure. We’re looking at everything.”

Michael disengaged his arm from Brayden’s grooming efforts and held the detective’s gaze. “So …what? You think it was for the hell of it?”

“We’re trying to find out who did this and why, but there aren’t any obvious pointers to anyone. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.” He shifted in his seat again. “Did Chad have any enemies?”

“Enemies?” Michael thought Chad was the least offensive person he knew. Easygoing, friendly, willing to go along to get along. “No. At least none that we would know about.”

“We have interviewed the two young men who found him. They said the same thing.”

Cheryl Tedesco called just as Tess was pulling into her driveway.

“There’s some great stuff on the micro card. I can’t send you anything official. This is FYI only. With your memory, you’ll probably be able to say this back to me verbatim.”

When Tess got off the phone a half hour later, she thought: Steve Barkman was a damn good investigator.

Tess saw in her mind George Hanley’s calendar—the three-day trip to LA written there. She’d found the ticket he’d paid for but never got a chance to use—the round-trip ticket to John Wayne Airport in Orange County.

Now she clicked on the link Cheryl had sent her. An AP article came up, no more than a few paragraphs—about a man whose remains were found near a mountain bike trail in Orange County.

The story was two years old.

Peter Farley was a systems analyst for a tech company in Orange County, an avid mountain biker who tackled the trails into Asteroid Canyon on the weekends. Asteroid was a canyon running through a relatively remote section of the Cleveland National Forest.

Farley had parked his vehicle in the wildcat parking lot at the entrance to the canyon. When he did not return to work after the weekend, a search ensued. His bike was found at the base of a short but steep hiking trail leading to a waterfall. Farley was found near the pool at the waterfall’s base, partially eaten and dragged into a hollow under the oak trees, buried under leaves and underbrush, his bloodstained wallet still in the pocket of his shorts.

The wounds appeared to come from a mountain lion. Hunters searched for the lion, but never found any sign of one. Not surprising, since a rainstorm had come through between Farley’s disappearance and the day he was found.

And then the kicker.

“In a cruel twist of fate, Mr. Farley was attacked previously at his home in Los Angeles by a pack of javelinas while walking his small dog.”

He’d saved the dog but was seriously injured in the attack when one of the javelinas bit into his femoral artery.

Tess thought of that day at Credo. Steve Barkman leaning into her space, too close. An obnoxious character with a creepy smile.

Still.

What Steve Barkman lacked in appropriate behavior, he made up for in brain cells. He had figured out what happened to Peter Farley. And he had linked it to George Hanley’s killer.