Blind Pursuit (22 page)

40

Annie said good night to Harold Gund at six-thirty. She lingered in her shop, turning off the lights, until she heard the growl of his van’s motor out front.

Peeking through the blinds, she watched the Chevy back away from the curb and swing toward the shopping center’s Craycroft Road exit. The brake lights flared as the van stopped at the end of a short line of cars waiting for a break in the traffic.

She left the shop and ran to her Miata. Sliding behind the wheel, she saw the Chevy reach the head of the line and pull onto Craycroft, heading south.

She followed. A red light snared her almost instantly, and she was afraid she’d lost her quarry. But on the long, straight downhill run she caught sight of the van again, well ahead of her.

The sun hung low, westering above a spread of green treetops, as she passed over the Rillito River into city limits. At times throughout the summer monsoon season, the Rillito would be a foaming watercourse, but now it was only a dry, sandy channel, grim and barren, a gash in the landscape.

Gund’s van was still in sight, though harder to track on this more level stretch of road. Annie dared to pull closer. Greater population density here, lots of intersecting streets, more chances for him to pull off.

Gund drove carefully, violating no laws. A good driver, it appeared. Annie wondered again how his van had been damaged.

Fender-bender, he’d said. She didn’t think so.

As Speedway approached, the Chevy Astro eased into the turn lane, left signal winking. Luckily two other cars followed suit, providing a buffer between the van and Annie’s Miata.

She made it through the intersection as the green arrow cycled to yellow, then cut her speed, dropping back slightly for safety. After a brief inner debate she switched on her headlights; keeping them off in the gathering dusk would only make her car more conspicuous.

The day’s end had begun to bring relief from the unseasonable heat. The air rushing through the dashboard vents and the open window on the driver’s side was mild enough to feel almost comfortable against her face.

Gund’s van proceeded at a steady pace despite the crush of vehicles. Illuminated islands of strip malls glided past. A city bus groaned to a stop in the right lane, flashers pulsing.

One thing was clearly apparent. Gund was not going home—not directly, anyhow. She knew his address; it was noted on his employment application, which she’d reviewed in the privacy of her office earlier that evening. He lived west of Craycroft, near downtown. Now he was traveling east.

Erin’s place wasn’t far from here. Was it possible he meant to cut over to Broadway, revisit her apartment?

If he pulled into Erin’s apartment complex, Annie would find a phone and call Walker.

But Gund didn’t cut over. He continued east, past Pantano, heading out of town.

The sun was an orange smear in her rearview mirror, a spread of blinding candescence settling slowly below the humped backs of the mountains. Then it was gone, leaving the range outlined in fire, the western sky blushing pink. Ahead, the sky was the deep, somber blue of encroaching night, and the first stars gleamed like droplets of quicksilver.

As the edge of town drew near, traffic finally began to thin. Annie wasn’t sure if that was a good development or not. On the one hand, she found it easier to keep the van in sight. On the other hand, Gund would find it easier to see her.

As a precaution she fell farther back, keeping the Chevy just within view. Its taillights burned against the dark.

At Houghton Road, Gund hooked south.

Where the hell was he going? There was nothing out this way. Nothing but the fairgrounds, and as far as she knew, no county fairs were underway this week.

She swung onto Houghton, then frowned. The road—straight, flat, and empty of traffic—mocked her efforts at concealment.

Cutting her speed, she dropped back until the van’s taillights were lost to view. Then she killed her headlights and accelerated, bringing the Chevy just within sight.

She was gambling that Gund would assume the car behind him had turned off onto a side road. Without lights, the Miata ought to be nearly invisible at this distance.

Leaning forward, squinting at the dark road and the red glow far ahead, Annie wondered if she knew what she was doing.

If the turquoise really had come from Gund’s belt ...

Then right now she was alone, a mile or more out of town, speeding deeper into the desert, in pursuit of a psychopath.

41

Her ruminations on Oliver’s epilepsy reminded Erin of the Tegretol.

Briefly she worried that he had taken the bottle of pills when he’d cleaned out the room. But no, there it was, among the foodstuffs in the cardboard box.

She washed down one tablet with a handful of water from the sillcock. Though she had missed her morning dose, a single lapse would do her no harm. Her doctor had assured her that she could go as long as twenty-four hours before withdrawal effects would develop.

It occurred to her that she must be hungry, though she hadn’t noticed. She peeled and ate a banana, then a few slices of bread. For protein she scooped her fingers into the peanut butter jar and licked them clean.

Her stomach, aroused, demanded more. She went on eating from the jar as she returned to her questions about Oliver Ryan Connor.

Oliver had been eighteen in 1968; he must be forty-six now. Sixteen years older than Erin and Annie—a wide age difference between cousins, but then, there had been a similar gap between their mothers.

Lydia had been born in 1931, in the fourth year of Rose and Joseph Morgan’s marriage. Maureen, their only other child, had made a much belated appearance in 1944, when Rose Morgan was thirty-nine, relatively old to be giving birth in those days. Erin had always assumed that her mother had come as a surprise.

In consequence of the disparity in ages, Lydia had been forty-two when she adopted her nieces, while Maureen, in that same year, had been only twenty-nine.

Twenty-nine. The realization was startling. She paused with a new scoop of peanut butter halfway to her lips.

Maureen had been Erin’s age when she had died. Younger, in fact. Erin was thirty. Maureen had never made it that far.

Dim memories of her mother had established her ineradicably as an authority figure, connoting age and wisdom. It was somehow shocking to confront the fact that Maureen Reilly had spent fewer years on this earth than her daughters had.

She dwelled on that reality a moment longer, then pushed it away. No good letting herself get sidetracked. It was Oliver who mattered now.

In their first session he’d admitted that his mother was blue-eyed, red-haired, and Irish Catholic, a description that fit Lydia exactly. He’d made it plain that he despised the Catholic faith for its opposition to abortion; well, the Morgans had always been strict in their beliefs, almost as strict as her own father.

Her father.

Erin lifted her head, struck by a new thought.

You’ll bur
n, Albert Reilly had promised, and the next night he’d set out to fulfill his prophesy.

Oliver, despite his denials, was almost certainly fixated on his mother. And his mother’s sister had died in a gasoline fire. A fire set by a man who once had loved her.

The logic of the subconscious was the logic of a dream. Identities melded; one sister blended with another; the death of an aunt could become the death of the loved and hated mother.

In the confusion of a subconscious association, had Oliver conflated Maureen with Lydia? Was that why he’d chosen burning as the method of death for the three symbolic Lydias he’d killed?

That had to be it. But why would he want Lydia dead, symbolically or literally? Why had he run away in the first place ... and why had he killed Lincoln?

Lydia might have known the answers to some or all of those questions, but only rarely had she spoken of her past. The subject had been tacitly understood to be taboo in her household while Erin and Annie were growing up.

The two girls had been curious, though. Thumbing through old photo albums, they’d come upon more than pictures of the ranch. There had been photos of Oliver as well.

Erin closed her eyes and tried to summon up a memory of the face captured in those faded Kodachromes. A vague recollection swam into partial focus. It was a snapshot of Oliver, roughly seventeen, posed with his father at a lakeside dock.

Lincoln had been smiling, a tall, wiry man with a baseball cap tipped forward on his forehead, the bill throwing his eyes into shadow.

Oliver had worn neither a cap nor a smile. He, too, was tall, as tall as his father, but broad-shouldered and thick-limbed. His hair was blondish and long, pulled back by a tie-dyed headband; a stubble of beard salted his face.

Erin and Annie had studied that photo for a long time, staring into their foster brother’s blue eyes, trying to glimpse his soul. But there was no soul to see. His gaze was blank, his features smoothed into an expressionless mask—and what made it worse was the peculiar certainty that it was no mask, that nothing lay underneath to conceal.

In that assumption, however, they’d been wrong, or partly wrong. At times, no doubt, Oliver had been as dead inside as his outward appearance would suggest. But at other moments anger must have risen in him, the blind, furious, seething anger that had driven him finally to lash out and kill. To kill the man standing beside him with his arm thrown casually over his son’s shoulder, the man in the baseball cap, laughing at the day.

Anger at what—and for what? If Lydia had ever known or suspected the dark whirlpool swirling below her son’s placid surface, she hadn’t spoken of it.

Yet possibly she had known more than she let on. Too much, perhaps, for her peace of mind. Certainly she behaved like a woman carrying a heavy burden of anxiety.

More than anxiety. Fear.

Erin nodded. Yes. Fear, along with the unconditional love she had shown toward her two young nieces, had been the dominant motif of Lydia’s personality.

She was always edgy and restless and afraid. Addicted to sleeping pills and tranquilizers, forever obtaining new prescriptions from new doctors. The variety of her nervous habits was almost amusing—her tuneless humming, her obsessive need to check and double-check every lock, the fretful attentiveness that made her look in on the girls every night, sometimes waking them inadvertently.

At the time the twins had attributed her eccentricities to the double tragedy that had scarred her life. She had lost a husband and son in the worst imaginable way; had lost a sister also, in another act of insane violence.

All that was left to her were her two nieces, and so maybe it was unsurprising how she doted on them, fanatically overprotective, touchingly proud.
I can’t believe how simply wonderful you girls are
, she would often say.
How perfect you turned out, how smart and beautiful and strong. You two mean more to me than you’ll ever know
.

She loved them, and cared for them, and worriedly monitored their safety. But possibly her concern was prompted by more than a generalized fear of suffering a final, irrevocable loss.

She might have known that Oliver was still alive. Might have known that he killed Lincoln, and that he could return one day for her—and her young charges.

Erin hugged herself as a chill shivered through her.

Us, she thought. That’s what kept her awake at night. Not fear for her own safety. She was afraid for us. Afraid of what Oliver might do.

They had taken his place, after all. She and Annie had been raised, in effect, as Lydia’s children. And Oliver, his memory expunged, had never been mentioned or acknowledged around the house.

In the van, while she lay blindfolded, feigning unconsciousness, Oliver had stroked her hair, her face, and breathed one word:
Filth
.

He hated her. Must hate Annie also. Because they had replaced him in Lydia’s heart.

Yes, Erin thought slowly. He must have hated us for years.

If Lydia had known her son was alive, then she’d been right to be afraid. He could have come after them at any time.

And now, at last, he had.

42

Two miles from the turnoff to the ranch, Gund became aware of being followed.

Though the sun had set, enough light remained to reflect off the windshield of a vehicle well to his rear, maintaining a constant distance from his van.

Of course, the driver might be only a commuter heading home to one of the rare, remote subdivisions along this road. But then why keep the headlights off, despite the dusk? Why, unless to avoid being seen, while holding the van just within view?

Testing his hypothesis, Gund accelerated. The other vehicle disappeared briefly, dropping below the horizon, then promptly reemerged.

Gund relaxed his pressure on the gas pedal; the speedometer needle dipped. His pursuer edged slightly closer before falling back to a safe distance.

No question now. None at all.

Someone was after him.

Pursuit implied suspicion; suspicion suggested the prospect of arrest. Of punishment.

Fear ballooned in Gund’s chest and was transmuted instantly into furious anger.

“Son of a bitch,” he breathed, in reference to no one and nothing. “Son of a
bitch
.”

He had known punishment before. Now in a disorienting flashback he felt the awful, crippling pain again, and with it the ugly shame of his forced submission.

Random scraps of memory whirled in his mind—hiss of running water, blood running down his leg like a menstrual flow, wadded tissue paper stuffed inside him to stop the bleeding, Lydia knocking tentatively at the locked bathroom door: “Oliver ...?
Oliver?
” The quaver in his adolescent voice as he made some reply. The sight of his face in the mirror over the blood-dappled sink, his eyes briefly haunted, then going safely blank.

A shudder slithered through him now, breath catching in his throat.

Oh, yes, he’d had his share of punishment, of discipline, of authority’s brutal lessons.

The police were only another brand of authority, offering a different form of abuse.

Yet not so very different, after all. He’d heard what went on in prisons.

If he was caught ... sentenced ...

Then he would not be Harold Gund any longer. He would be Oliver once more, Oliver Ryan Connor, poor helpless boy, pitiable victim.

No. He would not endure it again. He’d made that vow nearly three decades ago, in a forest clearing, and he would keep it as the sacred promise that it was.

No more punishment. Not ever.

Squinting in the sideview mirror, he strained to distinguish some details of the mystery vehicle’s appearance—shape, color, markings. White T.P.D. cruiser? Gold sheriff’s department car?

Couldn’t tell. Night was rapidly leaching the sky of the sunset’s last afterglow. He could see nothing.

But it was surely a law enforcement vehicle of some kind. Nobody else would be tailing him.

Had they tied him to Erin’s disappearance? He froze, chilled by that thought.

“No,” he grunted. “They don’t know. There’s no way they can know.”

But suppose they did.

Throughout the day he’d fought the impulses rising in him, maintained precarious control. He had not clicked off. Not yet.

Now anger began to split his concentration.

Won’t do it to me again, he thought, the words beating in measured counterpoint to the racing hammer blows of his heart. Not again.

The turnoff for the ranch was less than a half mile away. Just ahead, a different side road approached, running west, toward the fading memory of daylight.

He pumped the brake pedal briefly, cutting his speed only enough to take the curve without risk of a skid, and veered onto the intersecting road. Instantly he switched off the van’s single intact headlight.

This area was well known to him. In his youth he’d taken many long, solitary walks, exploring the desert around his parents’ ranch. He remembered the arroyo that paralleled this road, shallow and narrow, inconsequential compared with the one behind his ranch, but adequate for his present purposes.

Slowing to a crawl, he eased the van off the asphalt onto powdery desert soil, maneuvering among spiny outcrops of ocotillo and dark clumps of prickly pear.

Careful, careful. Another flat tire would be a catastrophe. He’d already made use of his only spare.

The lip of the arroyo slid into view. The pebbly bottom was no more than five feet deep, the incline of the embankment pleasingly gradual.

Shifting into low gear, he nosed the Chevy over the edge, descended to the streambed, and eased the van into hiding behind a fringe of mesquite shrubs along the arroyo’s rim. He cut the motor.

Clumsily he pawed at the glove-compartment latch. The pistol was in there, a blue-steel 9mm Taurus PT.

Wait. Better idea.

Under the dashboard, a mounted shotgun. A sawed-off Remington 870, purchased from a firearms dealer in Tucson shortly after his arrival. His purpose in buying it had been purely nostalgic; the gun was an exact twin of the one found in Lincoln Connor’s hand in 1968.

Gund unhooked the twelve-gauge, climbed out of the van. Ascended the embankment in darkness, then thudded down on his elbows and belly in a concealing patch of desert willow, the gun outstretched before him, the shortened sixteen-inch barrel snuffling at the road.

He worked the pump action, chambering a shell. Curled his forefinger around the trigger. And waited.

His breathing was low and regular, his pulse barely above normal. A gnat buzzed his left ear; he made no effort to brush it away.

He was a machine, reduced to a single function, his body a mere extension of the firearm in his hands, and, like the firearm, a deadly instrument. Shotgun and man were one, each capable of explosive violence, each held delicately in check. But not for long.

Nearby, a motor.

Splash of high beams through a scrim of weeds.

The pursuing car turned onto the side road, headlights on now, pace slowed to a crawl. The driver was clearly baffled. Must be wondering how the van could have evaporated, leaving no trace.

Slowly, almost lovingly, Gund tightened his grip on the trigger.

An easy kill. No need even to aim precisely. Just wait for the right moment, then point and shoot.

The spray of buckshot would tear through the car’s passenger compartment like shrapnel from a bomb. Anyone inside would be instantly cut to pieces. No time even for fear or pain. A hail of shattered glass and shotgun pellets, a split second of startled bewilderment, and then nothing more for the driver, only silence and darkness vaster than the desert’s desolation, forever.

He remembered what one blast from an identical shotgun had done to Lincoln’s face. Of course, that shot had been fired at point-blank range.

The strip of asphalt directly before him brightened with the headlights’ shine. The car crept closer, nearly alongside him now.

Not a squad car. Some low-slung, sporty model. Undercover vehicle. Must be.

Gund squinted along the barrel, lining up the sights, and prepared to shoot.

His face was calm, empty of expression. His pulse had slowed to that of a sleeping man. No slightest tremor moved through his body. Despite the warm night, no bead of sweat glistened on his brow.

A machine-man. Emotionless and efficient.

The shotgun lifted slightly, targeting the silhouetted figure in the driver’s seat, less than fifteen feet away.

His trigger finger began its lethal flex.

And he recognized her.

Annie. Her face dimly outlined in the glow of the dashboard gauges.

The car—it was her red Miata.

She was his pursuer. Not a cop.
Annie
.

His superficial calm shattered. His heart sped up; his mouth turned dry.

The car was moving on. Shock had nearly cost him his chance at a clean shot.

He drew down on the trigger again.

Another ounce of pressure, that was all it would take, and Annie Reilly would be dead.

But he couldn’t.

Not her.

Damn it,
not her
.

With a trembling effort, the greatest exertion of his life, he lowered the shotgun.

The Miata hummed past, the triangle pattern of its taillights shrinking, shrinking, gone.

Gund lay motionless, panting, until his pulse dropped to normal.

Then slowly he got to his feet. He stood on the roadside, surveying the darkness, dabbing distractedly at the film of sweat on his face.

She knew.

Or suspected, anyway.

But how? He’d done nothing to incriminate himself. He was sure he hadn’t.

Whatever the explanation, she was on to him somehow. And that meant she could not be allowed to live.

Despite his momentary lapse of resolve, it was obvious that to protect himself, he must kill her. He simply must.

“
No.”

The word, torn out of him, was wafted away on the warm, dry breeze.

He would not.

Yet there was no alternative. Already, Erin knew too much. Now Annie, too, had learned part of the truth.

Neither could live. Both must die.

“No,” Gund said again, but his voice was softer this time, a whisper almost, and the desert did not hear.