Light Before Day (48 page)

I turned my face away from him. He seized my chin with a sudden power that didn't match the trembling emotion in his voice. He forced my eyes back to his.

"You failed me once, Adam. You were sick. But I gave you a second chance. And you didn't fail me this time. You found my brother, just like I knew you would."

"I
was
sick?" I asked him. "I'm not sick anymore? You cured me, is that it?"

"Where is my brother, Adam?" he said in a low voice with nothing I would call love or admiration in it.

"You knew what Billy was going to do, and you left town without warning me," I said.

"Maybe
you thought I was going to find your brother. But if that didn't happen, you still would have taught me a lesson."

He took a step back. As soon as I got to my feet, he placed one hand on my chest to hold me in place. I wasn't surprised to see him level a mean-looking gun on me with his other hand. Both motions told me that I had hit on the truth beneath his exaggerated emotions.

"Billy said you liked his plan," I said. "He was right, wasn't he? You knew Billy wasn't just going to show me that tape. You knew he was going to put me through hell first. You knew that maybe just for a day or a few hours, I would believe that I had harmed a child. And then you would have taught me a lesson. The same lesson you taught Melissa Brady.

"You wanted me to think you used Daniel Brady as my body double to spare me? Bullshit.

You just saw another chance for revenge." He didn't respond. "You didn't follow me out here to ask me to live with you," I said. "You followed me here because I know you killed eight people.

You followed me here because I know what you did to Daniel Brady and his wife. Because I know you killed your own mother. But you couldn't kill
me
until I led you here."

Whatever spark existed in his eyes went out.

"Did you really want to give Caden a new life?" I asked him. "Or did you just want to get paid to kill your mother?"

"Where is he?" Corey asked. There was no concern in his voice. He had asked for the whereabouts of his younger brother as if the boy were simply the next in a long line of targets.

That was why, after breaching the perimeter of the compound, Corey had gone straight for the boys' quarters before pursuing Terrance Davidson. Even when it was clear that his younger brother was not among them, he had taken the two other boys from the compound. He had removed the living evidence of his crimes. Caden and I were living evidence as well.

"You didn't want to save your brother from this place," I said. "You saw Everett. You realized who you were really working for. And you wanted the exact same thing you wanted against everyone else who ever wronged you. Revenge."

He brought the barrel of the gun to my forehead and pressed it gently against the skin.

"You don't save people. You only punish them," I said. I saw a blur of movement in the darkness behind him, approaching fast down the slope of the hill. Corey took a step back and leveled the gun on my face.

"Every life I ever tried to make for myself was stolen from me," he said.

I said his name in a voice that I wanted to sound pleading. His face went taut and he shook his head in a slow denial of what he thought was a plea for my life. It was not a plea. It was a distraction. There was a crunch of grass from behind him. He heard it and pivoted toward it.

Caden McCormick raised a pistol in his hands. Corey froze. "Mom was right," the boy said.

"You're a demon."

Caden fired. I hit the dirt, saw Corey's body jerk. He tumbled in front of me, and when he rolled onto his back I saw the bullet hole in his throat. For a few seconds, the wound was black and bloodless. Then it filled.

The kickback had knocked Caden off his feet, and the pistol was lying in the grass between us. Stunned by the shock of gunfire, the boy was down on all fours, his back heaving, his neck lax. I sank to my knees in the grass next to him and placed my hand firmly on the small of his back, whispering hollow assurances under my breath to blot out the sound of Corey's blood-filled wheezing, holding the boy in place so that he could not lift his head and see the full effect of what he had done.

Corey went silent, and then I heard the sharp sounds of restrained movement from the back of the Lincoln Navigator. The other boys. I would never know what Corey had planned to do with them.

C H A P T E R 24

James Wilton was sitting on the stone bench at the edge of his property as I arrived at his house.

I took a seat beside him. Neither one of us said anything for a while. I had spent the last forty-eight hours in the custody of the Paso Robles police department. I eventually lost track of how many hours they spent interrogating me.

During my interrogation, the Paso Robles police got a call from a sheriff's deputy out in the Central Valley who told them she had a man in her custody. An anonymous 911 call had tipped the deputy to the man's location, a barren field just south of Highway 198's passage across the floor of the Central Valley. The deputy had discovered an audiotape in the man's front pocket.

The conversation on it was not for the faint of heart. The man was also missing three fingers.

The reporting deputy's name was Amy Stahl. She made no mention of a woman named Caroline Hughes.

I wanted to believe that Caroline had set out in search of me as soon as we got disconnected, and that she had turned back as soon as the story of what I had discovered broke across every radio station in the country. I figured she didn't want to explain the torture of Ben Clamp and the abduction of Eddie Cairns.

Now I told Jimmy everything. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. As I talked, he kept his attention focused on the San Fernando Valley's expanse, a view he had earned by creating contained versions of the nightmare I had just been through. He didn't interrupt or ask questions.

When I was done, he got to his feet and walked up to the line of hedges. "I'm going to start work soon," he said.

"On this?"

"A novel," he said. "It's about this young man who's so desperate for intrigue and escape that he ends up with blood on his hands. So he starts hanging with this group of black militants from the other side of the Bay. It's the early sixties, so that's not exactly the best choice. It doesn't go so well for him." He gave me a look. "In the end, the only stories I have are my own, little man."

"I'm sorry, Jimmy."

"Nate tells me he's been going to a lot of AA meetings. Have you thought about tagging along?"

"A little."

"So what do you think?" he asked. "Was he right?"

"Who?"

"Corey," he answered. "Did you grow into the man you always wanted to be? Were you cured?"

"Corey didn't even know who I was."

He looked out over the valley and shifted his weight painfully from one leg to another. I heard footsteps on the grass behind me. Jimmy turned and glared at someone over my shoulder.

It was the first time Brenda had been back to the house since Jimmy had asked her to leave.

"Adam's going to be staying in the guest bedroom for a while," she said. "I was thinking of cooking something, probably eightish." Jimmy turned his back to her. "Yeah, I let you have your moment,
big
man, but I'm sick of room service and you always get tired of playing God after a day or two, probably because you can't even keep a date book, much less keep Saturn spinning on its axis. So you can stomp around as much as you want and slam that overpriced cane down on your desk. But it won't change the fact that Adam's not dead and he didn't kill anyone, and as usual, you forgot about the most important part of playing God."

"What's that?" he asked without turning.

"You can't be wrong. Ever."

She walked off without another word. He returned to the bench.

"If you hadn't believed you were diseased, Corey wouldn't have believed it either, and he wouldn't have been able to do what he did to you."

I blinked and decided not to cry.

"Shell shock is about going blind, little man. Not having your vision expanded." He put an arm around my back and walked me toward the main house. "Stay awhile for real, this time."

* * *

Ben Clamp confessed to the extent of the operation he had been part of, and all twenty of the operation's paying customers were arrested. Clamp was going to be tried for the murders of five men, and there was little doubt that I would have to testify against him.

Brenda helped me move my things out of my studio apartment in West Hollywood. Some of them went into storage, and the rest of them went into their guest bedroom. They hadn't set a time for how long I was going to stay with them. I made a weak stab at organizing Jimmy's library as he disappeared into his office to begin work on a novel that he considered to be all his own.

I placed several calls to a Kings County Sheriff's Deputy named Amy Stahl. She did not return any of them. I did a little digging and found no evidence that Caroline Hughes had returned to her life in San Francisco. Ben Clamp had apparently described his abduction and torture at her hands in enough detail to make her a person of interest. I was sure Caroline had left the state. I was curious to know how well she did on the run when she didn't have someone to hunt.

Martin Cale's yacht had not been discovered, and the young man who had piloted it out to sea was still at large. Pictures of fifteen-year-old Jim Clark had been plastered all over the news. Not even in the desk or files of the late Billy Hatfill had anyone been able to locate a recent picture of the young man I had known as Everett, whose chance encounter with Corey Howard had

triggered a series of suicides and murders. He was the one missing piece of a story that continued to make national headlines weeks after it broke.

Jimmy and I both pressed Dwight Zachary as hard as we could for any information on Caden McCormick and learned nothing more than the fact that Caden, along with the two other boys Corey had abducted, were all being held at a psychological facility different from the one named in the news reports about them. Visitors were not welcome.

Thirty-four days after I had stopped drinking, I met Nate Bain at a newly opened recovery center just off Santa Monica Boulevard. The place had steel wool carpeting, folding chairs with thick cushions attached to the seats, and strident sayings in cheap frames hanging on the walls. There must have been a hundred other gay men in the room with us, and all of them looked so bright-eyed and fresh-faced that I couldn't imagine them ever having set foot inside a bar or a bathhouse.

The speaker was a small-framed raven-haired woman in a black pants suit. When she

announced she had been clean and sober since January 1983, there was a torrent of applause so loud it hurt my ears. She spent a good twenty minutes detailing the most depraved episodes from her days of drinking and using. Every shocking detail she shared was met with an explosion of laughter that made my own sense of shame over my numerous blackouts seem childish and melodramatic.

After she was done, Nate Bain was one of the five people who accepted a small token

celebrating his thirty days of continuous sobriety. The changes in him were evident. Weight had returned to his face, and he took careful pauses between his sentences.

After the meeting let out, a group of us walked up Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a clear July evening, and I could see all the way to the spot where the San Gabriel’s collided with the San Bernardinos under a purple sky. Nate slid his arm through mine and leaned his weight against me as he walked inside the halo of energetic conversation from his sober friends.

We were about to cross San Vicente Boulevard when I realized we were being followed by a tall, big-boned man in a baseball cap, sunglasses that were not necessary for the hour, and a rumpled blue shirt. After another block, I realized that it was not a man who was following us.

The knot in my chest softened.

I watched the person cross Santa Monica Boulevard and head in the direction of West

Hollywood Park, a small square of green space that sits across the street from the Pacific Design Center. I kissed Nate on the cheek and I told him I would meet him in a few minutes at Starbucks. There was a pull of worry around his eyes and it took him several seconds to release my hand.

I found Caroline Hughes sitting on a bench next to the empty playground. I hovered next to it instead of taking a seat. She was a wanted woman, and it was clear she was afraid that we were being watched. Under the back of her baseball cap, I saw her signature red hair had been replaced by thin black bristle.

"You're a hero now, Adam Murphy."

"Only because you didn't step forward to take any of the credit."

"Credit for what?" she asked. "Kidnapping a crazy meth addict?" She made no mention of the things she had done to Ben Clamp. "Eddie Cairns is doing just fine, by the way. We managed to find him a place in a nice recovery home up near Sacramento."

"We?"

She ignored the question. "Corey," she prompted softly.

I scanned our surroundings and saw one homeless guy wandering at the park's edge and a muscle bunny walking his poodle. I took a seat on the bench. "After they told him to kill himself, he started following me. He knew what Billy was going to do, and he let it happen."

"He followed you to his brother," she said.

"Right," I said. "So he could kill us. He wasn't interested in saving Ca-den. He wanted to get rid of all the evidence."

"On the news. They said . . ."

"Caden shot him."

I was surprised to feel her fingers close around my hand. She brought my hand to her chest and held it there for several seconds, her head bowed. I figured it was her way of thanking me for facing the man who had killed her mother.

"Who's
we,
Caroline?"

She got to her feet and pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from her pocket. In the forty-eight hours we had spent together, I had not seen her smoke one cigarette. She had applied a coat of base that concealed her freckles and it made her face appear oddly masklike.