Nowhere Safe (31 page)

She smiled. “Yes, I do.” Her hands started unbuttoning his shirt and he wanted to clamp down on those old fingers and rip them away from him. Instead, he allowed her to pull his shirt free of his pants, take the coffee cup from his hand, and set it deliberately on the counter, then grab his hand and tug him a step forward. “Come on,” she whispered.

No. He couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in him. There was nothing there.

His mind flew to Molly. Her shining hair. Her sweet ways. But that was no good. No. He needed to quash that and think of something else. Something he could have.

In his mind’s eye he saw the way her short skirt flipped when she walked, the little anklets, the tight ass.

He let Daria walk him to the bedroom, blind to everything but the scenario running through his head. Where the fuck had Lucky gone? Why had she left?

Daria was taking her robe off, but Graham was lost in another world. He had Lucky down and she was fighting him. He felt her hands on him and he threw her down on the bed and pinned her wrists. She was pretending to want him, making all the right noises, her hands roaming his body, but he knew she was playing some kind of game.

Well, fine. He could play that game, too.

He spread her legs with a hard knee and slammed into her, pounding as hard as he could, loud growls issuing from his throat, the sound of his burning frustration. She was going to
pay
for walking out,
pay
for leaving him hard and dissatisfied,
pay
for playing a game that only he could win!

“Ulysses! Goddammit. Ulysses!
Graham!
” He came to slowly to realize Daria was pounding on his back with impotent fists. “What the fuck was that about?” she demanded.

His heart was racing. He felt completely amped up. “You didn’t like it?”

“No, I didn’t like it! What’s going on with you? That’s the second time you’ve been too rough.”

Conversely, now that she didn’t want him, he wanted to take her again. Grabbing her shoulders, he held her down and she twisted and tried to jerk a knee up to hit him in the balls.

“Don’t,” he said through tight teeth, and then abruptly he was done with her.

He hated her too much to take her again.

She scrambled around and grabbed up her robe, breathing hard, half mad, half scared. “I really don’t like where this is going,” she told him, slamming out of the bedroom and stalking down the hall.

Well, fuck her. Graham headed into the shower and turned his face into the hot spray. His black mood from the night before had returned. How long could he keep this up? Not much longer. All he really wanted to do was grab her by the neck and smack her head into the wall until it was a bloody pulp.

He dressed in slacks and an open-collared shirt. He had no enthusiasm for the job, but until Daria was out of the picture he had to keep going.

Walking into the kitchen, he saw that she was staring out toward the garden, a cup of coffee in her hand, her face set. To his shock, she suddenly went to the kitchen drawer that held her business supplies, rooted around inside and came up with a handgun.

“Whoa, Daria! What are you doing?”

“I’m just going to scare him,” she said tautly.

His gaze followed hers out the window and he saw the coyote tugging on something under the raspberry vines.
Holy shit!

She ran outside, yelling at the top of her lungs, the bathrobe tie tearing loose and exposing her white sagging skin. As Graham watched in shock, the animal dropped the human hand that was in its mouth, unable to pull the whole corpse from the ground.

“Get out!” Daria screamed after him as he loped away.

She turned back, too mad at the coyote to look at what he’d uncovered. “Beasts,” she snapped as she came back inside and pulled the French door shut behind her.

“You scared him away. I didn’t know about the gun. Wow. But you scared him off.”

He was babbling and he had to stop himself. He felt high and weird. For a moment he thought he had gotten away with it, but then she glanced back through the window toward the raspberry vines.

The Maori statue was still on the kitchen counter where he’d left it the night before. He didn’t wait for her to think too hard. He snatched it up and swung it at her head with all his might. She half lifted the gun, some inherent last sense of self-preservation, but he caught her in the temple hard. She went down to her knees and pitched forward.

It felt great. Powerful. Better than sex.

“Daria?” he asked after a few moments.

She just lay there, face down.

Then he looked at the statue in his hand. He couldn’t believe he’d done it.

“Daria?” he tried again. She wasn’t dead yet, but she was as good as, he thought. “Damn!”

Well, there was nothing to do now but bury her with the others. Jesus. What a lot of work. He would barely have time before school to bury her, he thought as he headed to the garage for the shovel and rake. What time was it? He was going to be late. There was no getting around it.

He took off his shoes and donned his boots, then looked down at his pants. He would ruin them but, Christ, he had to get moving.

As he was coming out of the garage he thought he heard something. A sharp noise from inside the house. He glanced around wildly. Was someone here? He took several steps toward the front of the house, then turned back to the job. He had to hurry.

He went through the breezeway to the garden and shuddered when he saw Claudia’s hand and arm poking through the mud. Fucking coyote. He slammed the shovel into the ground beside the body, deepening the hole, shoving the body down in it with the toe of his boot, then covering up his ministrations. He’d already worked up a sweat even in the cool morning air, and he hadn’t even started on Daria’s grave. He was going to have to move all of these bodies and soon and it pissed him off.

He glanced at his watch. He couldn’t go to school. He couldn’t. He was going to have to call in. Dropping the shovel, he stalked back to the house, yanked off his boots and padded sock-foot through the mudroom.

Immediately he saw that Daria had dragged herself around the counter and into the center of the kitchen. There was blood on the floor, blood on the cabinets, blood on the counters, and the knife drawer was open. Bending down, he grabbed her hands, searching for the weapon. A small knife clattered to the floor.

Her glassy eyes stared at him.

“Trying to kill me?” he snarled.

When she didn’t answer, he picked up her limp wrist and tested her pulse.

A moment later he flung it back down.

“Too late, bitch.”

Hurrying to the den, he snatched up his cell and called the school. He’d hardly started in with his excuses when that ugly woman with the bad knees, Maryanne, insisted she was putting him through to Lazenby, who answered flatly, “Mr. Harding.”

“I can’t come in today,” he snapped at her.

“Are you sick?” she challenged him.

“I’m not feeling well, that’s true,” he said, surprised that she would dare to talk to him in that tone.

“I’ve asked for someone from the police to come and speak with us, and I’d like you to be here. You have Molly Masterson in your class and you know Claudia Livesay. I think it’s important you attend.”

“I just told you I can’t.” Should he manufacture a cough? No. Might sound too forced.

“Try to find a way,” she said unreasonably, and then hung up.

Graham was incensed. How dare she! She couldn’t do that. He would report her to the union. See how she liked that. High and mighty bitch.

But then he thought how everyone else on staff would be there, kowtowing to Lazenby’s wishes, sucking up for all they were worth. And if he wasn’t there, it would be noted, and not just by Lazenby.

He had to go. Had to.

In a flurry of fear and indignation, he grabbed a tarp from the garage and wrapped Daria’s body in it, then hauled her across the breezeway and into the garage, laying her on the concrete in front of the Lexus. The burying would have to wait.

He returned to the kitchen, scrubbing up the streaks of blood on the floor, wiping down the Maori statue, setting it back on the mantel. He poured the rest of his coffee down the sink and automatically filled up the coffee maker with water, replaced the filter in the basket and measured out tomorrow’s grounds, then put the carafe back in its slot.

He went into the bedroom and made the bed, then cleaned up Daria’s toiletries in the bathroom. His heart jolted when he saw her bag still half filled with her clothes and he ripped out the remaining items and threw them in the wash. Then he stowed the bag in the hall closet. He wanted no evidence that she’d recently come home from a trip.

Satisfied with the bedroom, he went to the den, found his porn CD and tidied up the couch. He took the CD into the spare bedroom and shoved it behind the knickknack shelf she had filled with collectibles. They were probably worthless but he would look at them later, when he had time to sort through and sell them.

Finally, he glanced down at his clothes—drops of blood and splattered mud were everywhere. Ripping off his shirt and pants, he threw them into the already running wash that held Daria’s clothes, not caring if they were ruined forever. Then he redressed, adding the touch of a tie this time, just to up his game. He practiced in the mirror until he’d perfected a somber expression. His color was still high from the physical exertion and he looked damn good.

He prowled around the house a few more times, making sure everything was in its right place, everything was perfect. Daria’s body was a problem, but there were no windows to the garage and he was going to lock it up tight after he took out the Lexus. It was his now, he figured. She wasn’t going to need it any longer.

With a rich feeling of ownership heightening his mood, he backed out of the garage and hit the remote, watched the door slowly close, wiping Daria’s remains slowly from view, almost like a magic trick.

“How to Beat the Recession and Not Let It Beat You!” he crowed.

Hah!

September had barely gotten in to work when George, who’d arrived before her, said, “There’s a detective from the Winslow County Sheriff ’s Department on his way.”

“Winslow, not Clatsop?” she asked, thinking of the investigation into Hiram Champs.

“Detective Will Tanninger from Winslow County. I wrote it down.”

“Oh, all right.”

As she settled into her desk, Wes arrived. “George says a detective from Winslow County SD is on his way. Have anything to do with you?”

“Nope,” Wes said.

“Maybe he wants to meet with the lieutenant,” she posed.

“D’Annibal’s coming in later,” George said.

“Whatever,” September said, turning her attention to the day’s work. “Nothing on our vigilante sketch yet?”

“A few calls came in,” George said without much enthusiasm. “Dispatch sent over the list and I looked it over. I put it on your desk if you and Wes want to check them out. Did you talk to the principal at Twin Oaks?”

“Yeah. Yesterday,” September said, irked that George seemed to be checking up on her.

“She called again today. Wants to have some kind of forum at the school. I told her one of us would come,” he said.

“Which one of us?” September asked.

He merely lifted his brows and she was pissed all over again. “Fine,” she said, then asked, “Is Maharis still working with us?”

“He’s got two missing persons now,” George said.

September felt a twinge of conscience. D’Annibal had asked her to help him with the Gillian Palmiter case, but apart from going to Gulliver’s, she’d left it all to Blake. “I’ll check with him on those.”

A few minutes later, the door opened into the squad room and a man and a woman walked in. The man was wearing the tan uniform of the Winslow County Sheriff ’s Department but the woman was just in jeans, a black ribbed, turtleneck sweater, and a black jacket.

September got out of her chair and was in the act of offering her hand for a handshake, when she met the woman’s eyes directly.

She was their vigilante!

“Who are you?” she asked, her gaze on the woman as the man shook her outstretched hand and introduced himself as Detective Will Tanninger.

“My name’s Gemma LaPorte,” she said, “and when Will and I saw the news last night, we realized you’re looking for my twin sister, Ani.”

“What?” September asked.

“We’ve been looking for her for four years,” Tanninger said.

The squad room was dead quiet. Both Wes and George were staring at Gemma LaPorte as well.

“Ani,” September repeated. “Why are you looking for her?”

Tanninger said, “The same reason you are. Because she has a sixth sense about sexual predators and targets them for death.”

Seeing the blank looks on their faces, Gemma said, “We need to give you some background.”

“Yeah.” September looked around. “There’s an interview room down the hall. . . .”

 

 

By the time Lucky pulled herself out of the safe cocoon of her room she figured Ugh had been at school for hours. She hadn’t had the nerve to follow him to Twin Oaks again and make sure. Even the parking lot was off limits now.

Mr. Blue had been right to ask her to leave. If she were found at his place with that sketch of her all over the news . . . It didn’t bear thinking about. She owed him her life.

But now her timetable had shrunk. There was no more time left. If she was going to get Ugh she was going to have to do it today.

With that in mind, she put on her black jogging pants and her baseball cap and placed a money band around her waist, stuffing in the rest of the cash Mr. Blue had given her and her room key. She drew her black V-necked Lycra shirt over her head, hiding the money band, then slipped on her matching black jogging jacket. From a hiding place among her clothes, she rolled out a flat felt case that held four small narrow pieces of metal, a set of homemade lock picks she’d asked Mr. Blue to find for her. She put the felt case in her jacket pocket and zippered it in. Then she grabbed up her wallet, which contained her fake ID, and shoved it along with the other items Mr. Blue had given her into the small backpack she used on her forays. At the car, she added the items from her glove box into the pack along with the placard that she’d had under the seat.

She would go to his house and wait for him.

“The first time Ani crossed our radar was when she ran down a man named Edward Letton in her car,” Will Tanninger told them. “Letton was a sexual predator. He had a van equipped with ropes, chains, handcuffs . . . child pornography, and he was in the process of trying to abduct a girl from a soccer field when Ani drove straight at him.”

“She saved the girl from capture,” Gemma added soberly.

September absorbed that and asked, “What happened to Letton?”

“He died from his injuries,” Tanninger answered. “Regardless of her motives, she killed him.”

“He deserved to die,” Gemma said.

“She’s your twin,” September said, not wanting to get into that gray area, though she felt very similar to Gemma.

“I thought it was Gemma behind the wheel,” Tanninger continued. “We didn’t know Ani even existed.”

“You didn’t know?” September asked Gemma.

“We were separated. Cleaved apart, actually, as we were conjoined. I’ve done some research in the town of Deception Bay since Ani appeared in my life. Our birth mother was known to all the locals as Mad Maddie. She was a seer, of sorts, and she apparently passed on that ability to both Ani and me. She named us Gemma and Ani for the sign of Gemini. The doctor kept Ani as a kind of payment while our mother slowly lost all touch with reality. I was luckier with my adoptive family.

“But I didn’t know any of this when Ani began killing. A psychologist would tell you she’s killing the doctor who abused her over and over again.”

“Letton wasn’t her only victim,” Tanninger said. “But Ani was also being stalked by a killer who thought she was a witch and tied her to a burning funeral pyre. She escaped somehow, then stole a woman’s car from the town of Quarry. That car was found in the ditch on a side road deep in the Coast Range about a week later. There’s been no sign of her since.”

“Actually, she was handed over the keys to that car by the woman’s developmentally handicapped son,” Gemma said. “I know she has to be stopped, but if there’s any way to save her . . .”

A long moment passed and then September said, “Some might say she’s doing the world a favor, but our job as members of law enforcement is to keep her from harming anyone else.”

“You sound like Will,” Gemma said, smiling faintly. “I’ve been thinking about her for years. I just want to be with her again.”

Wes spoke up. “You know we’ll take every precaution to bring her in unharmed.”

“Yes,” Tanninger said firmly. “But she is dangerous. She shot my partner and it was touch and go for a while.”

“Okay,” September said, a little boggled by everything they had laid down.

Gemma added, “She goes by Lucky. I don’t know why, but that’s what she calls herself.”

Tanninger put in, “I don’t know what her timetable is, but she may have already targeted someone else.”

After Tanninger went into the specifics of the cases Ani had been involved in four years earlier September asked, “How does she find her targets? I mean, choose one specifically.”

“No easy answer to that,” Tanninger said, looking to Gemma.

Gemma said, “You won’t believe me. I can tell already, but that’s fine. There is no explanation other than she just knows. It’s a kind of precognition. I have something like it, too, but it doesn’t work the same way.”

September stared straight at her, afraid that if she turned even the slightest toward Wes or George that she would hit them with a “can you believe this?” look.

Instead, she again went over the facts of the cases that Ani had been involved in four years before, keeping things on a level that made sense. Wes and George both asked questions, too, but in the end they didn’t know much more about Ani’s methodology than when they’d started.

As they rose from the chairs, Tanninger said, “I want to be kept in the loop.”

“Of course,” September told him, shaking his hand and Gemma’s once again. Wes and George echoed her sentiment. Knowing Tanninger was from Winslow County, she almost told him that she’d had some dealings earlier in the year with one of the deputies from his office, Danny Dalton, but decided against it. She hadn’t thought much of Dalton and Gretchen had considered him a complete moron.

It was gratifying to realize that in Will Tanninger, the county had someone who appeared more than capable.

After they walked Will and Gemma back through the squad room and the door closed behind them, September exhaled heavily and looked at Wes and George. “Well,” she said.

“Yes, ‘well,’” Wes said.

“Do you believe that shit?” George sank into his chair and it squeaked familiarly beneath his weight. “At least we know her name.”

“Two names,” September reminded him. “She goes by Lucky.”

“All right—Lucky,” George said. “How does that help us catch her?”

“Is she setting someone up?” Wes asked. “There was quite a bit of time between Ballonni and Harmak.”

“Let’s forget all the woo-woo and get down to basics,” September said. “Someone will have seen her.” She picked up the list George had left on her desk and saw the note that he’d scratched about Principal Lazenby’s request. “Let’s start calling and see what we come up with.”

Wes reached over and took the list from her hand. “Won’t take long to get through these.”

“Go ahead and do it. I’ll call Amy Lazenby back and see what I can do for her,” she said dryly, shooting George a look.

He lifted his hands. “She asked for you. So sue me.”

 

 

When Lucky got to the end of Ugh’s drive she found a spot on the street in her usual area. Drawing a deep breath, she climbed out of her car, slipping the small backpack over one shoulder. A man drove by in a car and gave her a wave, freezing her where she stood. Then she realized he’d recognized her from all the time she’d spent recently on this street. The houses were spaced far apart and back from the road so he’d probably seen her jogging, maybe even thought she lived on the street.

But if someone got a good look at her, and put two and two together . . . ?

She took a hard look around. Should she sneak up through the neighbor’s yard and scale the chain-link fence again, or should she boldly march up the driveway? Ugh should be at school and his roommate was still gone, as far as she knew. In the light of day, trespassing on the neighbor’s property didn’t feel safe anymore, but then, ever since she’d seen her face on television, nowhere felt safe.

Her own indecision disgusted her. In the end, she walked up the driveway, cautiously coming around the bend that opened up to the front of the house.

Ugh’s station wagon was still parked in front and the garage door was down. He must’ve taken the Lexus to school.

She breathed easier. The girlfriend must still be gone if he was driving her car. If all went well, with her skill set, she should be able to break in to the house and lie in wait for him. With that plan in mind, she cautiously moved into the breezeway, taking a look at the back doorknob. She tested it, just to be sure it was locked, and then pulled out her picks, placing two into the tiny hole of the lock, listening for the sounds that meant she’d tripped the tumblers. She wasn’t as adept as she’d once been and it took long minutes before she gained ingress. When the lock popped, she quickly slipped the picks back to her zippered pocket, then moved stealthily through a small room that entered into the kitchen.

The place smelled of disinfectant. Checking the sink, she saw traces of cleanser in the basin. She opened the cupboard beneath and plucked out a green can of Comet. The outside was slippery and damp. Was the roommate back after all? she wondered. Ugh just didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would go into full-on cleaning unless he had a really good reason.

Worried about the girlfriend, she did a careful reconnoiter of the house but found no sign of anyone. She was alone. But there were more signs of cleaning. The master bath had a woman’s toiletries all shoved together in a tight circle on the counter. No one had used them recently.

What was he cleaning up?

Back in the kitchen, she unzipped her backpack, the small ripping noise sounding like a cacophony in the tomblike silence of the house. She grimaced, listening hard, even though she knew she was alone. The loudest noise was her own thundering heart.

As a final precaution, she slipped back across the breezeway and turned the knob on the garage, finding it locked as well. Once more she plied her picks to the lock and this one took even longer to open. If she survived this, she was definitely going to have to work on her breaking in skills.