Blind Pursuit (29 page)

55

He picked up the phone on its fourth ring. “Walker.”

“Okay, Mike. I got what you wanted.”

The slightly whiny voice on the other end of the line belonged to Roger Dickinson of the county tax assessor’s office.

It was 9:25. Walker hadn’t expected his friend to get back to him so quickly. “Fast work, Rog.”

“Yeah, well, you try hanging out in the County Administrative Center when the place is deserted. It’s giving me the creeps.”

“You still there?”

“Sure. In my office. Got the info you wanted right in front of me.”

Walker uncapped a pen and flipped open a memo pad. “Shoot.”

Papers shuffled. “Harold Gund did purchase a ranch outside town. Two and a half acres in an unincorporated area of Pima County. Escrow was recorded on the ninth of February this year. Place must be in piss-poor condition; it was assessed at only $119,000—a bargain for a parcel that size.”

Even so, Walker wondered how Gund could have afforded the down payment on a clerk’s income, much less qualified for the financing.

“Address?” he asked, pen poised over the pad.

“One hundred East Ravine Road.”

As he wrote it down. Walker found himself frowning. The address tickled his memory, though he wasn’t sure why.

“Mike? You there?”

“Sorry, Rog. Just thinking. Look, thanks a lot for your help. I appreciate this.”

“We’re even for those Suns tickets.” It was not a question.

“All square. Thanks again.”

Walker killed the phone, got out a spiral-bound map book, and looked up Ravine Road in the index.

Flipping to the appropriate page, he surprised himself by stating the address aloud.

“One hundred East Ravine Road.”

Suddenly he remembered.

In the clutter of papers on his dining table were the two
Tucson Standard
articles Gary had given him. He found the one on the deaths of Lincoln and Oliver Connor.

First paragraph. Almost the very first words.

...
Lincoln Connor, 46, of 100 E. Ravine Road in the Tucson area
...

The Connor family had lived there. At the ranch. The ranch Harold Gund bought just two months ago.

Fear crawled in Walker’s gut, slimy and cold.

The fact that Gund had purloined a copy of Erin and Annie’s photo portrait might indicate nothing more alarming than an adolescent infatuation with one or both of the women.

But someone who sought out and purchased the old Connor home, paying more to acquire it than he possibly could afford, was in the grip of more—much more—than a harmless schoolboy crush.

Annie might be right about this man Harold Gund.

Walker blinked.

Harold ...

The loose end in the Connor case. A missing teenager. First name Harold. Last name unknown.

The same Harold? Harold Gund?

No, couldn’t be. Made no sense.

But Annie’s assistant spending a small fortune to purchase the Connor ranch—that didn’t make sense, either.

Or maybe it did. Maybe it all fit together perfectly in some subtle way Walker couldn’t quite see.

He shook his head. Didn’t matter. Time to puzzle it out later. Now he had to get hold of Annie, tell her what he’d learned.

He dialed her number. A message machine answered.

Not home. Damn. Where would she go?

He remembered her telling him how she’d followed Gund into the desert. Had she gone back, looking for the ranch?

Walker didn’t want to believe that. Wanted to think she had more sense.

But somehow he knew better.

He returned his attention to the map book. Ravine Road was a minor dead-end street, southeast of town, off Houghton.

Didn’t appear as if there were too many roads or ranches in that area. If Annie had gone looking for Gund’s place, she might well have found it.

And if Harold Gund was there, he might have found
her
.

“Christ.” Walker grabbed his car keys and his walkie-talkie. The ranch was outside T.P.D. jurisdiction, but it would take too long to explain all this to the sheriff’s department.

Out the door. Sprinting to his car, a blue Mustang, parked in the driveway. The engine turned over instantly. At the corner he hooked south.

The Mustang, his personal car, had no siren or light bar. He exceeded the speed limit anyway. He would run red lights if he had to. What the hell. He was a cop.

As the Mustang skidded west on Fort Lowell Road, speeding toward Interstate 10, Walker was speaking into the portable radio microphone, requesting backup.

56

Tramp of shoes. Air moving past her face.

Erin blinked, coming back to herself. For a disoriented moment she was a small child, and her father was carrying her up the stairs to bed.

Sleep would be good. She was tired, so tired ...

No.

It
was
her father, but not Albert Reilly.

Oliver was climbing the cellar stairs, and she was slung over his shoulder, a sack of trash, a bedroll. The chain trailing from her leg clanked after her, the padlock at the other end bouncing noisily.

Groaning, she tried to squirm free. Useless. The effects of the stun gun hadn’t fully worn off. Though her mind was clear, her limbs were numb, her movements uncoordinated. She flailed and kicked without strength, landing soft, random blows.

Top of the stairs now. Into the hallway.

She wanted to speak, to argue, to plead, but her mouth wouldn’t work right. The sounds she made were not words, not even wordless protests, merely unintelligible grunts and gasps, expressions of blind, consuming panic, panic of phobic intensity, panic that set her heart racing rabbit-fast and thrilled her with a roar of blood in her ears and a high electric whine in the bones of her skull.

She thought of the arroyo. Of flame.

Faint ambient light. The living room. Starlight spearing through the broken windows.

Hard to breathe. No air in her lungs, and her throat had closed. She remembered choking on fumes in a burning house, twenty-three years ago. That had been like this. Like this.

He stopped in the middle of the room, near its sole furnishing, the potbelly stove.

Alongside the stove, a shapeless heap of hair and clothes.

Annie.

Limp and still. Unconscious or dead. Propped in a seated position, her legs stretched out on the hardwood floorboards, her back resting against the stove’s round belly.

Oliver hadn’t simply deposited her there. He’d arranged her in that pose, as carefully as he would have arranged a bouquet in the flower shop. He’d made a display of her.

Erin saw all that, and abruptly she understood what he was about to do.

Not the arroyo.

Here.

He would burn them here, in the house of his childhood.

“
No!”
she screamed, fear finding a human voice at last.

Oliver flung her down.

She hit the floor hard. A groan racked her.

He crouched by her side. She wanted to scratch his face, gouge and claw, but still her body would not respond to her will. She could only thrash weakly, gasping in inarticulate protest, as he shoved her up against the stove opposite her sister.

Snap, and the padlock securing the chain to her ankle was released, the chain pulled free.

The ribbon of heavy welded links was drawn across her waist, her arms, then wound around the stove, encircling Annie also, before its two ends met, a snake swallowing itself.

With a jerk of his wrists Oliver yanked the chain tight, chokingly tight across her midsection, crushing her arms to her sides, pinning her to the stove.

Snap. The padlock was again engaged, joining the two ends of the chain.

Erin moaned, struggling for speech and failing.

Oliver moved away, his back to her, and then he was out the door, lost in the darkness of the night.

She stared blankly after him for a long moment. Then with a spasm of violent energy she shook her head, twisted her body, clenched her fists, reviving dulled nerves and spent muscles.

She could not afford numbness and lethargy, not now. She had to fight. Fight for survival—her own and Annie’s, too.

Blinking rapidly to clear her vision, she gazed down at the padlock nestled in her lap, its steel shackle glinting at her like a smiling mouth. The chain extended on either side of it, binding her and Annie to the stove.

If she could raise the chain a few inches, to the point where the stove’s belly narrowed in diameter, she might be able to slip free.

Breathing hard, she contracted the muscles of her lower back, pressed her palms to the floor, and struggled to push herself up.

The chain wouldn’t budge.

But why not? Why the hell not?

Craning her neck, peering at the front of the stove out of the corner of her eye, she saw the reason.

Oliver had carefully looped the chain under the handle of the loading door and snagged it on one of the pin hinges. It could be neither raised nor lowered.

All right, then, how about the stove itself? Could it be moved?

A downward glance gave her the answer. The stove’s legs were bolted to the floor.

There had to be something she could do. Free her arms, at least.

But she couldn’t. The chain was wound too tight, jamming her elbows hard against her ribs.

No hope, then. No chance for her. For either of them.

Licking her lips, dispelling the last of the numbness that had frozen her mouth, she called her sister’s name.

“Annie?”

She heard no answer. She had expected none.

Maybe Annie was dead already. It might be best that way.

Her gaze moved to the front door, hanging ajar, letting in the warm night breeze.

Oliver still had not returned.

But he would, of course.

Soon.

With gasoline.

57

Walker picked up two T.P.D. patrol cars at the interstate’s Miracle Mile entrance. As he passed the Valencia Road on-ramp, he collected a sheriff’s department cruiser also.

The patrol cars activated neither sirens nor light bars on the freeway, a standard safety precaution. Walker, still in the lead, used his horn to scare slower traffic out of the fast lane.

On a tactical frequency the other units were asking questions, and he was doing his best to fill them in. But his best, he had to admit, wasn’t very good.

All he really knew was that a suspect in a possible kidnapping might be at a ranch on Ravine Road, with a hostage.

Or two hostages.

Driving with one hand, he put down his walkie-talkie, switched on his car phone, and punched in Annie’s number.

A recorded voice came on, as it had the last time he’d called. “Hi, this is Annie. I’m not home right now, so if you’re a burglar, I’m in trouble—”

He turned off the phone. Swallowed hard.

I’m in trouble
, the message had said.

A joke, of course. Recorded days or weeks ago, irrelevant to this situation.

I’m in trouble
.

Ridiculous to dwell on those words, the mock plaintive tone of voice.

I’m in trouble
.

Leaning forward, Walker pushed the Mustang to eighty-five.

* * *

“Annie?”

Still no response from the other side of the stove.

Though it was futile, Erin struggled against the chain, as if believing that by sheer force of will she could crack open the welded links.

“Dammit, Annie,
answer me
.”

“Sorry, Doc. She can’t.”

Erin jerked her head toward the doorway, where Oliver stood motionless, watching her across yards of darkness.

His arms hung straight at his sides, his hands wrapped around the handles of two bulky metal canisters.

Gas cans.

“Did you ... shoot her?” Erin whispered. “Is she dead?”

“Unconscious.” He spoke in a monotone, all emotion drained from his voice.

“Let her go. Please. If you want one of us”—she sucked in a sharp, shallow breath—“take me.”

“I’m taking you both.”

He set down the gasoline cans near the door, knelt, and calmly unscrewed the lids, his actions controlled, deliberate, robotic.

Nothing she said could move him. Even so, she had to try.

“Oliver.” She held her voice steady, fear channeled into her madly shaking hands. “You can’t do this. Can’t keep on killing.”

“I won’t. You two will be the last. Once you’re gone, I’ll be free.”

He picked up one can, tilted it, and began to pour.

The gurgle of fluid from the spout set Erin’s heart racing still faster. Her legs twisted, knees bending and straightening, boot heels dragging on the floor’s hardwood planks.

In her mind a stranger’s voice kept up a manic, witless patter:
I’m afraid, so afraid, so very afraid
...

But when she spoke, her own voice was calm and reasonable, the voice of a therapist doing her job. “You’ll never be free that way.”

“Yes, I will.” Oliver walked with the can, pouring as he went, staying close to the living room wall. “Once I’m through with you ... once you’re out of my life ...”

“We’ve been out of your life before. After 1968 you weren’t Oliver Ryan Connor anymore. You could have stayed away from us forever. You didn’t.”

“No.”

“You waited until August of 1973. And then ... Well, you know what you did then.”

No response.

“It was you, Oliver. It had to be. Albert Reilly never set that fire. You did.”

Still nothing.

“Why? Oliver, tell me why.”

Even now he was silent. She feared he had slipped still deeper into the fugue state, to the very bottom of the abyss, where no voice could reach him.

Then, without looking up, he spoke one word.

“Revenge.”

Not much of a reply, but something. She had to capitalize on it, maintain a dialogue. “Revenge—for what?”

“I’d warned her. Warned Maureen never to tell.”

Erin understood. “She waited two years—but in the summer of ’68 she told Lydia at last. That’s why Lydia disowned you.”

“Yes.”

He reached the corner, then continued along the adjacent wall, methodically laying down a trail of fuel along the room’s perimeter. The smell of gasoline, the smell Erin hated more than any other, rose to her nostrils. Nausea coiled in her stomach.

She forced herself to continue her charade of disinterested professionalism. “Tell me about it.”

The noise he made was intended as a chuckle, but came out stillborn, a croak of pain. “An ugly scene. Lydia called me names. Terrible names. I told her she could say the same about the man she’d married. And I told her why.”

Erin nodded. It wasn’t fear for Oliver’s safety that had put Lydia in the hospital with a nervous breakdown, as everyone assumed. It was the double shock of learning the truth about her son and her husband.

The five-gallon can dribbled out its last drops. Oliver tossed it on the floor with a hollow clang. He walked past her, toward the doorway, where the other gas can waited.

Desperately Erin tried to keep him talking, fighting to reinforce the fragile connection she had established. “So you waited five years, then went to Maureen’s house—our house—for revenge?”

“But first I visited Albert at his office.” He hoisted the can by its handle. “He’d thought I was dead. I straightened him out about that ... and other things.”

“You told him you were our real father.”

Remorselessly Oliver began wetting down the opposite side of the room. “Came as kind of a surprise,” he said mildly.

“Weren’t you afraid he’d go to the police?” Erin wished the sound of her voice would cover the low, insidious murmur of gasoline escaping from the can. “You were confessing to rape and murder—”

“There was no risk. If I were arrested, the truth about you and Annie would come out.”

The truth. That they were products of an unnatural union, products of incest. Sideshow specimens. Freaks.

Oliver was right. Neither Albert nor Maureen would have willingly brought that fact into the light. Especially not in a small town like Sierra Springs, where everyone would talk.

He reached the doorway to the hall and continued past it to the living room’s rear wall. The thread of fuel was lengthening, inexorably boxing her in.

“What was Albert’s reaction?” she asked slowly.

“Shame. Grief. Most of all, anger. But not at me alone.”

“Who else?”

“Maureen.”

“My mother? She was the victim in all this.”

“Was she?” Another lifeless chuckle. “I told you, Maureen wasn’t married when she visited the ranch. Wasn’t even engaged.”

“Then when she found out she was pregnant—”

“That’s right, Doc.”

Erin shut her eyes. Her mother, panicky, unwilling either to abort the babies or have them born out of wedlock, had lied to Albert, convinced him that whatever precautions he’d taken had failed, railroaded him into a hasty wedding.

She remembered that nightmarish summer evening when Albert, drunk, wild with rage, had railed at his wife, rejected his children, and finally, in a fit of bellowing fury, had promised they would burn, burn,
burn
.

“In hell, he meant.” Her voice was a whisper, the words spoken half to herself. “In hell.”

The gasoline gurgled to a stop, the can empty. Oliver threw it aside.

“I let him suffer awhile,” he said. “Maureen, too. They might have assumed I’d done my worst. Then on the night of August eighteenth ...”

“You broke into the house.”

“Yes. Found Albert asleep in the den. Clubbed him unconscious. Soaked the ground floor first, then carried Albert upstairs and finished the job.”

“In the master bedroom. That’s when Maureen woke up.”

“She saw me, screamed. I gave her a good hard slap, just like I’d done in the barn. She was pleading with me when I tossed the match.”

The floorboards shivered under his slow, heavy tread. He moved to the stove and stood before her, staring down.

“You two got out that night.” Cold words. “But not this time.”

Erin gazed up at him, his face as round and pale as a full moon, his gaze still blank, void of compassion, empty of self.

“You’re lying,” she whispered.

Puzzlement flickered briefly in his eyes. “What?”

“Revenge wasn’t your motive. You had another purpose. A purpose you’ve never been willing to consciously acknowledge.”

“Too late, Doc. Therapy’s over.” He began to turn away.

“That wasn’t a fatherly kiss you gave me, Oliver.”

The words stopped him.

“In Sierra Springs,” she said, “you did more than visit Albert in his office. You spied on Maureen. Found out where she lived and observed her from hiding.”

He blinked. “How did you know that?”

“It’s what you always do. When Maureen visited the ranch, you spied on her from the arroyo. And when you came to Tucson, you must have followed me to learn where I live. I’ve got an unlisted address.”

“All right. I watched her. With binoculars.”

“And while you were observing Maureen’s house, you saw her two little girls—
your
girls.
You saw us
, didn’t you?”

“I ... saw you.”

“And you wanted us.”

A muscle twitched in his cheek. He said nothing.

“Even though we were little, only seven years old, you wanted us, just as your father had wanted you, just as you’d wanted your mother’s sister. Love and incest—you’ve never been able to separate the two. You wanted us.”

“If I did ... so what?
So what?
”

“That’s why you set the fire. Not for revenge. You meant to wipe out all three of us—Annie and me and Maureen—so we wouldn’t be there to tempt you anymore.”

“It would have worked. If you’d died—”

“Nothing would have changed. You still would have had the same needs, and you would have responded the same way—by burning other women. Women who reminded you of us, because they were Catholic or they were young or they had the same color hair. The details wouldn’t matter. You would have gone on killing no matter what.”

“I wouldn’t. Dammit, it wouldn’t have been like that.”

“It would. It would have to be. It always will. You think that by killing the object of your desire, you can kill the desire itself. You’re wrong. What you’re trying to destroy is within you, not outside you. It’s part of you. It
is
you.”

“It’s not.” He shook his head blindly in a last, desperate effort at denial. “You’re the problem, not me. You and Annie. Filth. Whores. I’ll get rid of you, and then I’ll be free, God damn you,
I’ll be free.
”

“You can never be free that way—”

But he wasn’t listening anymore. A ripple of spasms in his shoulders, and he pivoted away from her, moving fast toward the front door. Helplessly she called after him. “Oliver?
Oliver?
”

At the door he turned. Something trembled in his hand.

A matchbook.

“I’ll be free,” he said once more, his voice muted and faraway.

He took a backward step, removing himself from the flash zone. A wisp of orange light flared between his fingers.

Flick of his wrist, and the match traced a slow arc through the darkness.

The gasoline vapors ignited even before the match hit the floor, triggering a split-second chain reaction that engulfed the lower portion of all four walls in a flexible sheet of flame.

“
Oliver!”

Her scream didn’t reach him. Nothing could reach him now.

Cymbal crashes of shattering glass. Every window in the room disintegrated simultaneously, blown out by the rapid expansion of superheated air.

“
Oliver!”

Still no response, though he must have heard her. He had not moved from the doorway.

Erin had spent her life studying fire and fire starters. She understood what happened next only too well.

The upward rush of intense heat kindled the walls, boiling off the wood’s most volatile contents. In a heartbeat the mist of outgassed turpentine, resin, and oil achieved its flash point, feeding the flames even as the gasoline vapors were consumed.

Convective updrafts teased the fire relentlessly toward the ceiling. Indrafting air from the front door and the broken windows flung exploratory firebrands across the floor.