Disturbance (2 page)

“Look, Aaron, I really don’t—”

“He’s walking.”

“Walking?”

“Yes. On his own. And not just walking—he’s got full use of his limbs, with very few limitations. Apparently the type of injury he had is one of the few that have such a good prognosis. His doctor says that, for his age, he was unusually fit. And he was incredibly determined, really worked hard. I guess the trickiest thing was this last surgery on his neck. They’ve kept his progress under wraps, waiting to see how he did after the surgeries, and with the rehab.”

“Oh?” I managed to say.

I looked down at my hands. My fingers were shaking. I pressed them against my cheeks. It was like sticking my face in a bowl of ice.

“Yes. His docs say he’s doing much better than most patients his age.”

I stayed silent. This time, Mikelson noticed it.

“You okay?”

“No,” I said. I tried again to marshal my thoughts. “Um—this isn’t an interview, is it, Aaron?”

“Jesus, Kelly. No. Just a friend calling a friend.”

I apologized.

He said not to worry about it, then added, “Listen, later, if you’d be willing—”

I bit back a few choice phrases. “I’ll have to talk to my editor about it.” But the anger was good. It drove off some of the panic.

“Sure. Sure.” He paused. “Look, Parrish isn’t going anywhere, even if he can walk—now that he’s finished rehab, he’ll be transferred out of the prison hospital and into maximum security.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I keep thinking about that guy who lost his leg because of him. The forensic anthropologist—what was his name?”

“Ben. Ben Sheridan.” God. I’d have to tell Ben.

“Yeah, that’s right. I mean, how ironic is it that he’s not walking and Parrish is?”

“Ben walks just fine,” I said, unable to keep the anger out of my voice. “He lost part of one leg below the knee, but he’s got a prosthesis. He leads an active life. In fact, he’s still helping to put away assholes like Nick Parrish.”

Mikelson paused just long enough to let me know my reaction had surprised him, then said a little too brightly, “That’s great. Glad to hear it—I mean that. So he’s doing okay. Maybe I’ll try to give him a call.”

I shut up again, thinking of how unhappy Ben was going to be with me if Mikelson called him. Aaron could have looked up the information he needed anyway, but I had made his work a little easier, and I wasn’t happy with myself for that.

“There was a partner, right?” Aaron asked. “The original Moth. Parrish’s partner is still in the slammer, right?”

“Yes.” I left it at that, my resentment rising a notch. He knew damned well that Parrish’s accomplice, who had helped
him escape and lured victims into his grasp, was serving an LWOP sentence—life without possibility of parole.

Aaron isn’t stupid. He knew he needed to stop pushing if he wanted my cooperation down the road. So he changed the subject and asked me about mutual friends and former
Express
employees, and caught me up on news of a couple of people I knew at the
Sacramento Bee.
Eventually, he said, “Sorry if I upset you about Parrish. Just thought you should know. And you’ll let me know first if John cuts you loose to talk to other media?”

“Sure. Thanks for the heads-up.”

I called Ben Sheridan’s cell but got his voice mail. The outgoing message said he was away and out of cell phone range but would be returning late Tuesday. Leave a message.

I decided I couldn’t leave this news of Parrish as voice mail, so I simply asked Ben to give me a call when he got back to town. I hung up, wondering if Mikelson was already in the process of tracking him down.

Calling Ben had forced me to collect my thoughts. My blood might be running cold, but I still had enough ink in my veins to realize that this was a breaking story, and one the
Express
needed to cover. Mark Baker, our crime beat reporter, was at his desk, so I got his attention and filled him in. He’s known me a long time and quickly figured out that overt sympathy was probably going to make me lose it, so we mutually pretended this news wasn’t personal.

He called the prison hospital and confirmed the details. At that point, we got together with our editor, John Walters, and the city editor, Lydia Ames. A few more meetings were held, and plans for the front page changed.

I didn’t really want to be writing about Parrish or reminding the public—or myself—of his crimes. But under current conditions, every day with a job at a newspaper felt like a stay of
execution, so I didn’t shy away from the work, however much it amplified my fears.

Rumors were at a fever pitch at the
Express.
No one had any doubt that the paper was in financial trouble. If a buyer wasn’t found soon, we’d close. Bets were being laid on whether our publisher, Winston Wrigley III, was going to resign or be canned before the place shut down entirely. Some said he stayed on because he had nothing else to do with his life, others that he seemed to believe the captain ought to go down with the ship. Most of us felt that this particular captain should have been thrown overboard a long time ago.

But the general state of the industry wasn’t his fault, and as much as I disliked him, I couldn’t help but find him a pitiful creature now. His shame surrounded him like a force field, repelling his critics even as it protected him from our anger. His grandfather had founded the newspaper, his father had built it into one of the most powerful businesses in the city. Yet the newspaper business was one the next son had never understood, and now it punished him for his ignorance. Although his father had seen Winston III’s weaknesses and had been smart enough to set things up so that he answered to a board, too many family members were on that board, and they often protected sonny boy. Luckily for us, these days he avoided his employees—Winston III spent most workdays wandering aimlessly through the many parts of the building that were now all but empty.

For the staff, morale was at an all-time low. We stomached the group “good-bye parties,” fought against the pressure put on senior staff to retire early, and went to too many funerals—the heart attack rate among our oldest male reporters and retirees should have triggered a study by the CDC. Admittedly, these were the guys who, in their salad days, had never touched a salad, and I’m sure the high-pressure work, the years of hard drinking, and the once smoke-filled workplace took their toll.
But it was hard not to believe that loss of dignity was the final nail in their coffins.

Old newspapermen were dying. The rest of us had to listen to people who believed all in-depth professional reporting could be replaced by text messages. The saying might have to change to “Don’t believe everything you read … on your cell phone.”

It wasn’t just the
Express
that was being measured for a coffin, of course. The whole profession had been hearing eulogies while it was still on life support.

That afternoon, though, the newsroom was stirring to life in a way it hadn’t in some weeks. Stories about Parrish, our local monster, sold papers. We could provide the kind of detail that wasn’t going to be available on television. I had doubts that anyone living in the city needed a recap, but I dutifully told them of that time when Parrish—manacled and heavily guarded—pledged to help us find the body of one of his victims. It was part of a plea bargain, in exchange for which he would receive a life sentence rather than the death penalty. At the request of the victim’s family, I accompanied the group that journeyed into the Sierra Nevada to recover her remains. We walked into a trap. I was one of the few lucky ones—I lived.

Parrish escaped and continued to terrorize Las Piernas and other cities while he was on the loose. When he was finally captured, he was injured and almost completely paralyzed. Between that and his conviction and imprisonment on additional murder charges, the good citizens of Las Piernas breathed a sigh of relief. They were safe.

Those of us who had been in the mountains with him never felt completely safe again.

By the end of the
day, I was a wreck. When I came home, I told myself I was glad that my husband, Frank, was away on a
camping trip with our next-door neighbor, Jack. Glad that they had taken our two dogs with them. Frank needed the break, and the dogs loved going to the mountains. Maybe by the time they got back, I’d have calmed down.

Except for the company of my elderly cat, Cody, I was alone.

Not for the first time, I reminded myself. After all, when you’re married to a homicide detective, there are plenty of nights when he’s not home. Although the dogs were usually with me, this wasn’t the first time Jack—who is in many ways as much their owner as we are—had taken them camping.

Nick Parrish was in prison. He might be able to walk, but he wasn’t going anywhere. I made dinner for one and watched television. Avoided all crime programming, which turned out to be about half of what was on. Other channels I flipped because I didn’t want to shop from my TV or watch someone cook. I still found enough to stay amused. The distraction worked for a time.

I was safe, wasn’t I?

By the time I went to bed, though, I could believe that for only a few minutes at a time. I tried to sleep. After an hour of tossing and turning, I switched on the light and grabbed a book of crossword puzzles. I was still awake when the alarm went off.

I kept telling myself I had nothing to fear.

I was wrong.

K
ai Loudon pointed the Smith & Wesson at the blurred photo on the computer screen. Not a great photo of her face. Just one of those small, low-res images from the newspaper’s Web site. The same one appeared next to all of her stories. Irene Kelly.

He took aim between her blue eyes.

He made a popping sound with his lips as he clicked the mouse in his other hand, setting the computer to sleep mode. The image disappeared as the screen blanked.

He sighed and set the gun down on his desk. Not even close to the real thing. She was alive.

Kai seldom used guns anyway. They were good to have on hand for unexpected trouble, or to let someone know you meant business, but he thought them an unsatisfying way to kill. He had never actually shot anyone. He would rather use his own body to demonstrate his power over others. He was young and strong.

He stood and began to move restlessly around the basement. He paced past the bookcase, distractedly running his long fingers lightly over the spines of one row of books. He paused before a second set of shelves and touched various little
mementos displayed there. Most weren’t biological, but the few items that had once been parts of living things were the most exciting to him.

He picked up a lock of hair and inhaled. The shampoo scent had faded in all but his memory, where it came back to him now as clearly as the night he had captured the dark, silky curl. The woman who had been sitting in front of him in the theater hadn’t even known he’d taken it.

At least, not at first.

He carefully replaced this small treasure and kept walking until he reached the computer again. He stared at his reflection in the darkened monitor.

He had been using the Internet to search for more details on the big story. The newspaper and television reports hadn’t told him much. If you entered “Nicholas Parrish” in any news search engine, you got thousands of hits. Since this morning, when the story came out in the
Express
, the number had increased.

The recent stories started with the predictable phrases. “Convicted serial killer … perhaps as many as fifty victims, including six members of the Las Piernas Police Department …”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forced himself to relax. He glanced at his watch. His mother was upstairs, waiting for him to make dinner. She would have to wait a little longer.

He smiled to himself, savoring his rebelliousness.

Others had always seen his mother as a docile creature, but he knew that she had a way of getting what she wanted. His very conception had epitomized her acts of passive aggression. She used to be fond of telling him that it was a miracle she had not miscarried after the beating his father gave her on learning of the pregnancy. One of these days he would ask his father
and find out if that story was true. He was inclined to believe it. To him, the story was just another indicator of her ability to endure hardship in order to get what she wanted.

He did not consider this trait to be heroic in any way.

He paused, wondering if she had what she wanted, these days. She couldn’t make it down the stairs now, which made him savor his hours in the basement all the more. Still, it was time to have dinner. He locked the room and slid the false wall back into place.

He climbed the stairs with some anticipation, but not for the meal, which would be something he would prepare without real effort, and would be exactly like the meal he had prepared the previous day, and the day before that.

His anticipation came from the knowledge that today’s issue of the
Express
would be upstairs. His mother had been a subscriber for years. He didn’t usually read it, but this morning he had noticed the name Parrish in the headline, and instead of his usual routine of putting the paper straight into the recycling bin, rubber band and all, he took it to the kitchen and opened it carefully, with something approaching reverence.

This regard was not for the newspaper itself, of course. Not the reporting, not the photos, not the layout. It was the subject of the article that entranced him: Nicholas Parrish.

The story had changed his whole day.

Kai grinned and took the stairs two at a time. He went to the freezer, removed a frozen dinner, and put it in the microwave. He grabbed a can of a nutritional shake from the refrigerator and fitted it with a straw. The evening meal would be the usual silent affair. Afterward, he would read the story about Nicholas Parrish aloud to his mother. Her current state of health would force her to listen to it, like it or not. She would not. For him, this would be as good as dessert.

He stood in the kitchen, listening to the hum of the
microwave. The air began to smell of steaming broccoli, melting cheese, and warming plastic.