Disturbance (25 page)

He suddenly paused, smiled a smile I didn’t like much, and stared at me.

I stared back.

He looked away first.

I was doing my damnedest to hide the spike of exhilaration that brought me when he started back in on the rules.

The rules weren’t too complicated.

I was to attend to Violet’s needs and help out with the care of Kai. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what he meant by “care of Kai,” but I wasn’t going to ask. Kai would be brought to this room when necessary. I would not be allowed out of this set of three rooms for any reason until Parrish decided to let me out. Parrish would make use of me for whatever purpose he chose by whomever he chose, but he was going to give me a few days to think about what that meant.

He smiled again but left without a rematch of the staring contest.

He locked the door.

Now that he was out of sight, I allowed myself to sink into the chair in Violet’s room. I was still not fully myself. The drug, the fear, the missing hours, the disruption of my normal sleep-wake cycle—I knew all of that had left me unsettled. But the longer I was awake, the more I began to set aside that earlier sense of hopelessness and defeat.

I was also processing some surprising observations:

Parrish looked like hell. When I stopped thinking about his whole catalog of savagery, and thought just about what had happened in his life over the last few years, I realized it only made sense that his injuries and incarceration would have taken a toll on him.

I couldn’t afford to ignore the rest of his history or pretend that I didn’t know what he was capable of doing to anyone he saw as an enemy or prey. It could be fatal to underestimate his dangerousness, or to forget how much he enjoyed the suffering of others. Still, not only was he not Godzilla but he
wasn’t Nicholas Parrish. Or at least not as I remembered him.

Which nevertheless left me locked in a room with someone who had apparently once found him lovable, although she didn’t seem so fond of him now. If she could be trusted. For all I knew, Parrish knew Morse code and had been communicating with her all along.

I moved back toward Violet. She was still awake, looking at me.

“Do you know where we are?”

Big lodge. Camp. San Bernardinos?

That gave me a little hope. The San Bernardino Mountains had remote areas in them, but if this was a camp, there was a road nearby that was probably large enough for buses, and that meant there might also be neighbors or even a small town not too far away.

“Any idea what Parrish means by ‘care of Kai’?”

Kai was shot.

A memory of hearing gunfire came to me. “Who shot him?”

Don’t know. Quinn, maybe.

“Quinn?”

One of the brothers.

“Quinn Moore? The real estate developer?”

Don’t know. Has lots of money.

For a few moments, I found it hard to take in. Quinn Moore was well known in Las Piernas—famous as a young man who had inherited a successful but narrowly focused commercial real estate sales company and expanded it into a local powerhouse, transforming blighted industrial buildings into modern lofts, shops, and restaurants.

But then I set aside his public persona, the one he wanted to sell, and thought of the bodies found on his property. Still, the police said he was not suspected in the murders of Marilyn Foster and her son, Cade Morrissey. He had been
investigated—I knew that much. He had been very cooperative and had seemed genuinely shocked by the discovery of bodies in the buildings. If he owned this place and Violet had seen him here, though …

Then the full meaning of what she had just said began to sink in.

“
One
of the brothers? How many are there?”

Don’t know. Three here.

“Now?”

No. Quinn and Donovan are gone.

Donovan.

And I had fallen for what was undoubtedly a made-up story …

But she was signaling me again. “Sorry, I was distracted—can you repeat that?”

They have some hold over him.

“Some hold over whom?”

Donovan. Kai talks to me. Likes to brag.

“What hold?”

Don’t know. Donovan has to do what Nick says. Kai knows some secret about him.

I had the sense that she knew more than she was telling me, but I decided not to push just now. She was extending a lot of trust just by letting me know she could communicate. I needed to build on that trust.

“Parrish wants me to provide care for you. Are you okay with that?”

What difference does it make?

“I don’t know what can be done. I suppose I could just not do anything, but I don’t think that would work out well for either of us.”

No. Sorry.

“As Parrish mentioned, I took care of my father, but he
doesn’t seem to understand that, although my father was weak and bedridden at the end of his life, he wasn’t paralyzed. He had stomach cancer. It was almost thirty years ago, so not only am I out of practice but I have no experience with spinal cord injuries.

“Some aspects of your care may be the same, but you’ll have to let me know. I’m not a raw beginner, I’m not squeamish, and I am not unwilling to help you in any way I can, but you’ll need to give me instructions. Can you manage that?”

Yes. Thank you.

So she began to tell me, slowly and painstakingly, what she needed. She had a C-4 spinal injury, so she could breathe on her own, but her limbs were completely paralyzed. She had also received a head injury that impaired her ability to speak. She could chew, swallow, and slightly move her shoulders. Doctors had tried to get her to use them for yes and no responses, but she had been uncooperative.

I wasn’t sure if I should feel honored or disturbed by her willingness to communicate with me. Five years of that kind of lack of interaction with others would have been enough to drive most people crazy. I asked her why she had decided to talk to me.

You know Morse code.

“I can’t be the first person you’ve come across who does.”

Second. Learned it from Donovan.

I was surprised, but I didn’t reply to that. It was getting harder and harder for me to know what to believe about Donovan—or Violet, for that matter. She was saying more, so I concentrated on reading her signals.

I don’t get out much.

There was a look of amusement in her eyes.

What I didn’t know about spine injuries was vast, and I wasn’t going to be able to get more than a quick summary of
concerns in one night. It was simply too wearying for her to blink enough code to explain it all. I had already guessed that this type of injury would require help with feeding, with staying hydrated, with movement to avoid bedsores, with bladder and bowel management, with washing and dressing. That much I had been through with my dad at the end of his life, although even in those areas, Violet’s situation was different in many ways.

She mentioned that her spine could no longer carry messages from the brain about heating and cooling, so she did not sweat below her shoulders. That meant that maintaining a normal body temperature was a concern—her body temperature would fall or rise with the environmental temperature. She needed assistance with coughing. There were exercises that were needed on a daily basis to prevent a host of problems. There were complex concerns about her blood pressure, which might rise dangerously in response to pain stimuli signaled to a brain that could not get the message; the potential for injuries she could not feel; and other issues.

It was time to apply lotion to her skin and move her—pressure sores are a serious problem for anyone who is immobilized. I did my best.

I didn’t kid myself that her brief instructions qualified me to take care of her, but making the better-than-nothing cutoff eased some of the guilt I felt over my lack of expertise.

She fell asleep not long after that, and after sitting in her room for a few moments, wondering how the hell I was going to get out of this mess and what would become of her if I somehow managed to escape, I decided to go back to “my” room.

I thought again about the contents of the duffel and went through every item in it, including the pockets, wondering if tucked away in one of them I might discover a message from Donovan, one that would explain everything.
Sorry about
drugging you and leaving you with a serial killer, but if you look under the floorboards, you’ll find a bazooka.

Alas, nothing. Not even lint.

I searched the room again, found nothing I had not found before, and realized that, between activity and anxiety and perhaps the residual effects of being drugged, I was tired. I decided Parrish was unlikely to find many thrills in killing me while I slept and lay down. I avoided the half of the bed he had touched.

I prayed that someone would find out where we were. That Kai might have been seen driving a van up here, or might have gone shopping or otherwise appeared in public before our story about him broke.

I knew Frank would already be looking for me. I just had to stay alive until he found me.

F
rank Harriman knocked the clock radio off the nightstand as he reached a fumbling hand to find the cell phone. He answered groggily but came more awake when he realized what his lieutenant, Jake Matsuda, was saying to him.

Jake wasn’t a ranter, but by the time he had killed you with kindness and long explanations of how you might be compromising a case, you wished he would have just yelled and gotten it all over and done with in one tenth of the time and one one hundredth of the guilt.

At one point, Frank said, “Reed and Vince knew I was going to talk to him.”

“Yes, they told me, when I talked to them after Mr. Moore’s attorney called me.”

“I didn’t harm him or threaten him or anything of that nature.”

“No. You’re far too professional for that sort of thing, I’m sure.”

“I hear the warning in that, Jake, but I promise you, I talked everything over with Reed and Vince, before and after. All I really did with Quinn Moore was look for his reactions to a couple things, like the art.”

“Under other circumstances, I think it would have been an excellent line of investigation to pursue. Perhaps without tipping our hand to him, however.”

“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t see it that way.”

“Nothing to forgive. Still, I find I have to ask you to choose one of two options here, Frank, or this will end badly for all of us. Either take some time off or let me load you up with so much other work you won’t have time to get involved in Reed and Vince’s cases.”

“If you think I can just sit this out—”

“Oh no, I don’t,” Jake said mildly.

“I’ve got three more weeks of vacation time coming to me this year. I’ll take a couple of weeks of that now.”

“You don’t have to use up vacation time. We can call it administrative leave.”

“I find myself not wanting to be in the department’s debt.”

There was a long pause, then Jake said, “All right. Have a good vacation, Frank.”

D
onovan woke late in the day, momentarily disoriented to find himself in a dimly lit space, staring up at rafters. He listened carefully before slowly sitting up.

He was in the attic of one of the cabins, having easily defeated Quinn’s and Kai’s pathetic attempts at creating an improved security system.

A few hours earlier, he’d used a disposable cell phone to make the anonymous 911 call that would ensure Quinn got to a hospital. He’d then destroyed the phone and driven to a street in Las Piernas, parked the Escape, and after one brief detour, walked a mile to the place where he had earlier parked a used Subaru Forester. Like the Escape, it had been purchased with cash given to him by Quinn.

He had then made a journey of several hours to the desert. Although by this time he was feeling tired, he stopped by a storage building he owned, picked up equipment and supplies he had not been willing to put in a vehicle parked on the street, no matter how safe the neighborhood, and stored them in the Forester in compartments he had specially built into it, compartments that would not be easily detected. He left his own Honda Accord behind, locking up the building. He realized it
was a weakness on his part to keep the Accord, but it was one of a few symbols of what he was reluctantly recognizing as his optimism. His hope—no, his belief—that somehow he would prevail over the mounting odds against him.

He had of course known that the Escape could not be used past a certain point, although it had served its purpose well and would perhaps provide one additional bit of help in the coming days.

He’d driven closer to the mountain camp in the Forester. Despite his exhaustion, he’d parked it at what he considered a reasonable distance and hid it. Then, donning a pack that held a portion of the equipment he had brought with him, he’d hiked back.

He had reached the property just as the sky began to softly lighten in the east.

He had briefly considered simply returning to the main lodge. It had been a long and arduous night. Parrish would doubtless have welcomed him. It would have been easy to accept a comfortable bed inside—but not if he calculated in the odds of being murdered in his sleep.

So instead he had checked the garage near the currently unoccupied caretaker’s cabin, assured himself that neither Kai’s van nor Quinn’s Lexus—which he himself had moved into the garage on the previous night—had been driven recently, then hiked a short distance to one of the more remote cabins on the property.

He had climbed into this dusty attic after obscuring all signs of his arrival, set a few booby traps for anyone who might come too near, and no sooner crawled into his sleeping bag than he had fallen deeply asleep.

Now he awakened among the recreational odds and ends stored and forgotten here—a badminton set, a volleyball net, a raft that did not look seaworthy.

He did not know if Irene Kelly was still alive. His check of the van had told him that, as of this morning, Parrish had not left, or driven it elsewhere and returned, but that was all he had been able to determine.