Crosscut (38 page)

“To . . .”

“Yeah, to draw us out here. Come on.”

Working together, they lifted her to her feet. Abbie tried to support her elbow, but she said, “Don’t touch me,” and tottered to the van. She flopped into the back, collapsing on the bench seat like a broken toy.

“Why isn’t Wally with you?” she said.

“He’s gone to take care of the kids.”

“Take me there.” Her voice cracked. “I want to be safe. That’s safe.”

“No, we’re going to get you to the hospital.”

“I don’t want to go to the hospital. Why won’t you take me to where the kids are? Nobody will take me there.” She lifted her head. “Tommy, where are your kids? Can you take me there?”

Abbie got behind the wheel and fired up the engine. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“Why are they all safe and you’re out here with that fucking gun? Abbie, how come you won’t help me?”

“Val, we’re doing that right now.”

She U-turned and put the pedal down.

 
The siren was blaring nearer. In the pickup Swayze snapped her fingers at Jesse.

“Faster, come on,” she said.

He tossed the wheel over his shoulder into the backseat and hauled the frame of the chair into the truck. He pulled his feet in and slammed the door. Twenty-five seconds, pretty damned fast. He yanked the disabled placard off the rearview mirror and stuck it in the glove compartment.

An LAPD black-and-white came hauling up the street, lights flashing.

“What are you waiting for? Go,” Swayze said.

“Chill.”

Two cops got out and strode to the apartment building. When they walked through the door he signaled and pulled away from the curb. Swayze’s forehead was creased, a line digging between her brows.

“Well played.” She sounded grudging. “But you said you wouldn’t expose me to the police. You’re breaking your bargain.”

“I said no such thing. I said if you help bring Coyote in I would delete the e-mail.” He glanced at her. “Anything I can do to keep Coyote from getting close to Evan and her friends, I’m going to do.”

Accelerating around the corner, he stuck his phone in the hands-free set and called China Lake information to get the number for the police department. Waiting for them to put him through, he headed into central Hollywood.

“Back to your office?” he said.

“Yes. Can you access your e-mail and delete it from there?”

“When Coyote’s out of action.”

He hit Hollywood Boulevard and headed for Westwood. Over the speaker, the China Lake police switchboard came on the line. They told him that both Detective Chang and Captain McCracken were out. He tried not to yell at the operator.

“Take this down and get the message to Tommy and McCracken. It’s crucial.”

He told her what he’d found at the apartment. She sounded perplexed, and repeated it to make sure she had it right.

“Yes. Get the information to them
now
.”

Ending the call, he looked at the phone. Who could he call to explain why he’d left the crime scene? He didn’t know anybody at LAPD. The district attorney’s office? They passed the Chinese and the Egyptian theaters. Tourists thronged the sidewalks under the postcard-blue sky. Swayze unbuckled her seat belt and turned around, kneeling on the seat and leaning into the back.

That alarmed him. “What are you doing?”

She came back with Coyote’s laptop. “Figuring out how to contact Kai and draw her in.”

He nodded at Coyote’s necklace. Swayze was wearing it around her own neck.

“With that?” he said.

“And this.” She held up a plastic case with a cross on it. “Her medical kit.”

“What’s in it?”

“Anabolic steroids and stimulants, looks like, prepped for intramuscular injection. Kai must consider it a treatment to keep the prion under control.” Her smugness was almost radiant. “She’s going to want it back.”

He hoped she was right. The talisman and medical kit would be more powerful draws for Coyote than a teddy bear placed on a grave. If they could pull her away from China Lake, the sooner the better.

Swayze opened the computer and it came to life.

Jesse nodded at it. “At the apartment I read an e-mail. The address it came from was bassett-dot-cl-dot-edu. Somebody at Bassett High School is e-mailing her.”

She opened the e-mail program. “A friend? Or a contact, perhaps.”

He had too much to think, too much to do, and was nowhere close enough to protect Evan the way she needed protecting. The message he’d left for Tommy and McCracken would sound insane, he feared. Coyote, this woman Kai Torrance, had possession of Evan’s high school journal and Valerie Skinner’s yearbook. She could have obtained them only from Valerie herself. And when she got them, she wouldn’t have left Valerie alive.

Reaching for the phone, he punched Evan’s number.

 
I grabbed Dad as I ran, pulling him along, flinging open the screen door and hearing it bang against the wall and bang again when Officer Brinkley came streaking out behind us. Crows were swooping up over the peak of the roof, landing on the chimney, screaming as though maddened. I pitched toward the cruiser and dove in the nearest door, the driver’s. Dad and Brinkley thudded into the backseat. We slammed and locked the doors.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Dad said.

“The fuck was all that?” Brinkley said. “Fucking shit.”

“Did you see? Did you see it?” I said.

“I saw it, yeah.” Brinkley ran his hands over his face as though wiping off slime.

A crow swooped, black and mean, wings spread, talons out, and landed on the hood of the car. It opened its mouth and cawed at us.

Brinkley and I screamed, a loud, stupid, shrieking
agh
, and flung ourselves back against the seats, hands in front of our faces.

“God. Shit.”

The bird’s black eyes glared at us. A piece of meat hung from its beak. I hit the horn and held it down. The bird flapped away.

“There’s a body on the bed,” Brinkley said. “The place was covered with those birds; did you see it?”

I saw it, heard it, smelled it, and felt it as though that wall-to-wall carapace of shining black wings were covering my own flesh.

“I have to call the station,” he said.

To do that he needed to get in the front seat. He put his hand on the door handle and two more crows landed on the trunk of the car. Their claws scratched the paint. Brinkley pulled his hand off the handle.

“Put the radio transmitter up against the mesh.”

He told me which buttons to hit and he spoke through the screen into the mike. His voice was loud, no longer eager but verging on panic.

“Possible homicide,” he said. “Send detectives and the crime techs and an ambulance.”

The image of shivering black wings and feasting mouths wouldn’t leave me. And something else.

I replaced the radio transmitter. “The feet on the bed. Did you see them?”

“Yes. God
damn
, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“What did you see?”

“That bird perched on the shoe, picking at the toes.”

“The shoe.”

“Sandal, I mean. A woman’s sandal.”

I turned around and looked at his pale eyes. “The other shoe was a cross-trainer.”

There were two bodies on the bed.

“Kit.”

Behind the mesh screen, Dad was holding up one of the framed photos from the mantel. My vision was thumping. For a second my brain locked up, before I understood.

“Coyote got them both,” I said.

He pointed at the date stamped in the corner. “Taken last month. Easter.”

“What are you talking about?” Brinkley said.

The photo showed the woman who must have been Alma Skinner, a parched gal in her sixties with a cigarette in her hand. She was arm in arm with Valerie. It was the Valerie I remembered from high school: fleshy, voluptuous, with that imposing nose and a look of injury and entitlement in her eyes. She was the picture of robust health.

She was not the terminally ill girl who had baby-stepped into the reunion, not the woman I had picked up in Canoga Park, not the woman who had flown up here with me on the plane. However, she looked much like her—the hair, the eye color, the posture. Subtract seventy pounds, give her a nose job and a supposedly fatal illness, and she could have passed. She
had
passed, showing a driver’s license as photo ID to the airline.

Valerie was dead. She’d been dead before the reunion. Coyote had assumed her identity.

The radio squelched, the dispatcher calling to tell Brinkley that backup was on the way. I held the transmitter up to the screen and pushed the button so that Brinkley could talk.

“We have two DBs here,” he said, “and a possible ID on them. Valerie and Alma Skinner.”

The dispatcher said, “Valerie Skinner? Did you say you’re at the Skinner residence?”

“Affirmative.”

“Detective Chang went with a citizen to help a Valerie Skinner.”

Oh, my God. I spun. “Who?”

Brinkley asked her.

She came back. “Detective Chang went with a Mrs. Hankins to assist Valerie Skinner. She’s apparently wandering along the edge of the rim road north of town.”

“Tell her to get Tommy on the radio,” I said.

Brinkley relayed that. The dispatcher came back. “Negative. He’s in Mrs. Hankins’s vehicle. We don’t have radio contact.”

I was feeling panicky. “What’s his cell phone number?”

Brinkley looked confused. “What is it?”

I started the cruiser and threw it in reverse. “We have to find Tommy and Abbie. They think they’re going to pick up Valerie. They’re wrong.”

“Hey—”

Brinkley slammed against the screen as I spun the tires, backing down the drive.

“Stop. Immediately,” he said.

I threw the wheel and the car slewed around. “They can’t get Valerie. She’s dead.” Jamming the gearshift into drive, I floored it. “If it’s not Valerie, it’s Coyote.”

Turning in to the underground garage at Argent Tower, Jesse tried one last time to get Evan on her cell. Nothing. The high desert had swallowed her, and he didn’t know if the China Lake Police Department would get his message to Tommy and McCracken in time. He needed to do more. He pulled into a parking spot, and Swayze once again knelt backward on her seat, packing up the stuff she’d taken from Coyote’s lair.

He stuck the phone in his pocket, opened his door, and stopped. His nerves felt like they’d been scraped raw with a cheese grater. He took the phone out again.

“What are you doing?” Swayze said.

“Calling the FBI.”

He scrolled through a list of stored numbers. The phone fell out of his hand.

A ringing sound came into his ears. He tried to lift his hand and couldn’t, couldn’t even close his fingers. He felt dizzy. His arms buzzed and his face felt numb. The lights were spangled. He turned his head and saw Swayze, calm and vicious and pleased, and now the view was spinning. He fell forward against the steering wheel.

“Wha’d you—”

His tongue refused more than that. Noise now, loud ringing. He fought to focus his eyes and saw his right leg, a hypodermic syringe sticking into his thigh like a tranquilizer dart. He fell sideways into white oblivion.

In the backseat of the cruiser, Officer Brinkley slapped his hand against the mesh screen. “Pull over. Let me drive.”

Dad shook his head. “That’s not going to happen, son.” I kept my foot down, fumbling for the radio with one hand. “Can I use this to make contact with a cell phone?”

From the description the radio dispatcher had given, Tommy and Abbie were driving up the rim road along the edge of the base, ten or fifteen miles north of us. No other China Lake police units were in their vicinity. A Highway Patrol car was near the Isabella turnoff on Highway 14, but we were several miles closer. Everybody else from the department was busy south of town at the train wreck and Shepard-Cantwell murder scene.

We reached the asphalt road. The car gained traction and leaped forward. It had a huge, snarling engine, and though it boated like the
Exxon Valdez
, all I cared about was getting hold of Tommy.

“Forget calling a cell from this radio,” Brinkley said.

I pushed the transmit button and held the handset to my face. “Somebody, come in.”

The police dispatcher answered. Aiming the car up the road, I yelled at her to contact Tommy’s cell. “And call this number, too. Jesse Blackburn.”

Brinkley shouted through the screen. “The China Lake Police Department is not a call-forwarding center.”

“I don’t care. If they can get Jesse,
he
can try to raise Tommy on the cell too. The point is, we have to get hold of him.”

But I had a bad feeling that Tommy’s cell phone was as useless right now as mine was. We were going to have to catch them in person.

“Don’t you get it?” I said. “Coyote came into town dressed as a man, this guy Robin Klijsters. Only that’s probably an alias.”

“Kai Torrance,” Dad said.

“Yeah. Tommy’s still waiting for confirmation from military records, but that’s my bet.” I glanced at Dad in the rearview mirror. “If Coyote’s a woman, then Maureen Swayze was either wrong about Torrance, or she didn’t tell us all she knows.”

I saw him exhale heavily.

I held tight to the wheel. “Coyote killed Valerie and her mother. She did it before the reunion and hid the bodies in the back room. Then she disguised herself as Valerie. It’s all been a ruse.” I shook my head. “That suitcase on the floor in the spare bedroom isn’t the same one that Val brought on the plane.” For the fourth or fifth time I had to correct myself. “Coyote, I mean.”

And didn’t I feel like an idiot. “She got us all divulging everything we had learned about South Star.”

Dad nodded. “And because she seemed so ill, everybody overlooked the drastic change in her appearance.”