Someone's Watching (31 page)

“There’s a car in there,” Jeremy said. “I’m guessing Mister M likes to keep a spare.”

Something rubbed against Robbie’s ankle and she let out a gasp.

“What?” Jeremy turned to her. “What’s wrong?” He bent over. “Well look who’s here.”

The large, long-haired cat they’d seen the night of the party meowed up at them.

“I wonder who feeds her if no one’s home,” Robbie said.

“Maybe she fends for herself—birds, fish, wild berries.”

Robbie shook her head. “I don’t think so. This cat’s well tended. Look at her fur.” Robbie put her hand on Jeremy’s arm and lowered her voice. “There must be a caretaker who lives here.”

“But no lights are on.”

“Maybe he’s coming back.”

“Then we should hurry.”

She glanced at the entrance to the house. In the darkness, the flying dragon sculpture looked particularly menacing, as though it might come to life if anyone tried to cross the threshold.

The cat meowed again, then took off toward the back of the house. Robbie went after her.

“Where are you going?” Jeremy asked. “We were just back there.”

“You’ll see.”

The cat climbed the open wooden staircase leading to a rear balcony, then disappeared.

Robbie followed her up the steps.

“We’re going in through a sliding glass door?” Jeremy asked. “What makes you think it’s unlocked? And even if it isn’t locked, opening the door would set off an alarm.”

“That’s not how we’re getting in.”

They reached the wide balcony with its unobstructed view of the bay. There were two lounge chairs and a small table between them. On the table were a couple of bottles of beer, still with liquid in them.

Jeremy pointed at the beer.

Robbie nodded. Was someone home? Not likely with all the lights out. Maybe the beer was from last night’s party.

She stepped closer to the sliding glass doors. The interior drapes were drawn, making it impossible to look inside the room. From the desirable location, Robbie guessed this was the master
bedroom. The sliding doors extended most of the length of the balcony, but there was a small section of outside stuccoed wall. And in the wall was something Robbie remembered from the night of the party. A kitty door.

She bent down and pushed the flaps aside. Meowing came from inside.

“You’re going in through the cat door?” Jeremy asked. “You’ll never fit.”

“I think I will. The opening’s pretty big.”

Robbie got down on her hands and knees and manipulated her body through the rectangle, pulling herself up on the other side. It was dark, but she recognized the hallway from which she had seen the cat slip outside through the flapped opening last night.

Jeremy put his head between the thick plastic flaps and tried to squeeze his shoulders through. “I don’t think I can make it.”

“I’ll check if the alarm’s on.” Robbie opened the door to the room with the balcony. Too dark to see anything. She took out her cell phone and flipped it open, using it like a flashlight to look around. It was, as she’d expected, the master bedroom. At the side of the door was an alarm panel. It said “Enter code to arm system.”

Strange that it wasn’t armed, but she wasn’t going to argue with luck. She went to the sliding doors, unlocked one, and pulled it open. Jeremy stepped inside.

“Pretty cool,” he said. “You should become a cat burglar.”

“Very funny.”

“I wonder why Mike wouldn’t have turned on the alarm,” Jeremy said.

“Maybe the police were the last ones here and didn’t know the code.”

Jeremy opened the drapes. A dull light leaked in, casting the room in black and white, like an old movie.

Jeremy held out his open cell phone. The weak light fell upon a
platform bed, mirrored wall and ceiling, flat-screen TV over a built-in black laminated cabinet. Opposite the mirrored wall was another grotesque dragon painting. This dragon had breasts.

“Nice taste in artwork,” Jeremy said.

A white rug covered much of the marble tiles.

“Damn,” Robbie said.

“What?”

She pointed at the floor. Their muddy shoes had left footprints on the tiles and rug.

“Shit.”

“Should we clean up?” Robbie asked.

“There are probably muddy prints everywhere outside and on the stairs and balcony. Fingerprints, too. We’d better just hope we find what we came here for.”

Robbie went over to the cabinet and opened a drawer. “He very likely kept the videos in his bedroom.”

“I’ll check the bathroom,” Jeremy said.

Robbie sorted through the drawer—handcuffs, whips, chains. In another drawer was an assortment of sexually provocative outfits. Other drawers had underwear, clothes, more sex toys. She pulled open the drawer beneath the TV. It was filled with carousels of DVDs. She used the light from her cell phone to go through them.

Jeremy came back into the room. “It’s interesting,” he said, “the medicine cabinets are empty. I’m guessing Mister M cleaned out the illegal stuff in case the cops decided to have a look around.”

“Look at these,” Robbie said. “There must be hundreds of DVDs.”

Jeremy examined one. “These are commercially labelled. I don’t think he’d stash his blackmailing videos in with these.”

“But there are a few that have strange labels with nothing on them but handwritten numbers.” She held one out for Jeremy.

“Could be something.”

Robbie went quickly through the rest of the videos. She found only a few with the numbered labels and put those in her satchel.

“Let’s check out his office,” Jeremy said. “That’s also a likely place for him to keep DVDs.”

“I think we should go. What if the caretaker comes back?”

“Come on, Robbie. We’re here.”

Unhappily, Robbie followed Jeremy down the hallway, past the dragon paintings. A faint gray light came in through the transparent roof above the pool. Jeremy opened one door after another. All bedrooms.

The cat was back, meowing with some urgency.

“She must be hungry,” Robbie said.

They walked around the pool to a section of the house they hadn’t been in last night. There was a large den with a billiard table and built-in bar. The cat meowed.

“I’m sorry,” Robbie said to the cat. “I don’t know where your food is.”

The next room had double doors. Jeremy pushed them open. The cat rushed in ahead of them.

The drapes were drawn so it was difficult to see, but it appeared to be an office. The light from her cell phone was dimmer, as though the battery was weakening, but Robbie could make out a large black desk protruding from a wall of built-in cabinetry, a sofa against the far wall, a strange shaped table in front of it. She heard the cat lapping water under the desk.

Something was wrong. Drawers and cabinet doors were open. Papers and books littered the desktop and marble floor.

Jeremy was bending over the strange table in front of the sofa. She followed the light from his cell phone.

Not a table. Someone was lying stretched out on the floor, stomach down, arms extended as though reaching, face turned toward Robbie. She took a step closer. The eyes were open and
bulging, tongue protruding from a mouth puckered like a fish gasping for air. And then she saw the thin white scar cutting across his distorted lip up to his nose.

Dead. Mike’s henchman was dead.

“Looks like he was strangled,” Jeremy said. “But it doesn’t make sense. Who would want to kill him?”

Robbie felt dizzy. With all the death she’d come so close to, she had never actually seen a dead body. She tried to keep herself from falling, from throwing up.

The cat wove around Robbie’s legs, leaving muddy paw prints on the white tile. Had the cat stepped into mud, too?

Robbie leaned over and touched the cat’s paw. Her finger came away sticky. It had a metallic smell.

Blood? But there was no blood here.

The light from Jeremy’s cell phone swept over the marble tiles brightening the area behind the desk.

First, Robbie made out two silver cat bowls. The food bowl was empty.

Then she processed the shape next to the bowls.

Mike was crumpled up on the floor like a discarded mannequin, his thin ponytail pasted to his cheek. His mouth and pale eyes were open, as though in a permanent scream. The blood from his slashed throat pooled on the white marble floor. In the dimness, it looked black.

The cat nosed its food bowl and let out a pitiful meow.

Robbie and Jeremy raced out of the office, down the stairs, and through the dense shrubs at the property line. Branches and thorns cut into her arms, but she ignored the stinging pain. She heard something fall through the bushes, and then hit the ground. It sounded like a small rock, but they didn’t have time to stop and check it out. They had to get away from here.

When they reached the old Honda, they were both breathing hard. They climbed into the car and Jeremy pulled out of the driveway. He sped along the dark, winding road coming to a stop at the two-lane highway.

“Wait,” Robbie said. “We need to go back and call the police.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No. Jeremy, listen. Our footprints and fingerprints are everywhere. They’re going to think we killed Mike and the other guy.”

“And you honestly believe if we call the police, we’re clear? How are we going to explain what we were doing at his house?”

Robbie leaned back against her seat, holding her satchel against her chest. There were bloody scratches on her arms and her toes felt cold and nasty in her soggy sneakers. “Let’s at least talk this through before we drive away.”

“We can talk while we’re driving.” He turned into the flow of traffic.

Robbie was vaguely aware that a car had come out of the road behind them and also made the left turn.

“I know you don’t like leaving,” Jeremy said, “but think about what happens if we stay and call the police. They’ll bring us down to the station to question us. They already believe I killed Brett. Do you really think just because we call them, they won’t consider us suspects in these new murders? We’ll be top on their list.”

“But when we explain everything to them—”

“Now you’re just being naïve.”

Robbie was silent. The northbound traffic was moving quickly. They were getting farther and farther away from Mike’s house. And the farther they went, the more pointless it would be to turn back. “So what are you thinking?” she said finally.

“Hopefully, the bodies won’t be discovered until tomorrow. That gives us time to figure out what’s going on before the cops connect us to them.”

“It’s not going to look good for you.”

“But you and I know I didn’t kill anyone. So who did?”

They drove past the strip shopping mall with the turquoise awnings where they had stopped last night. They had kissed and were about to go to a motel for the night when Jeremy had noticed a black car with tinted windows.

Later
, Robbie had told herself.
We still have later
.

But if they didn’t figure out who the killer was, there would never be a later for the two of them.

“We assumed Mike was behind everything,” Robbie said. “If it’s not Mike, then who killed Brett and Tyra, and why?”

The streetlights illuminated Jeremy’s bruised eye and cleft chin. He was looking straight ahead. “Let’s do this logically. What’s the connection between Mike and Brett and Tyra?”

“We think they were all in on the blackmailing business. If we
stay with that assumption, then who would have a reason to kill them?”

“Did Mike have a partner?” Jeremy asked. “Someone who would have had a lot to lose if the blackmailing operation was exposed?”

“I don’t think so. Brett never mentioned anyone.” Robbie realized she was clutching her satchel. In it were the numbered DVDs she had taken from Mike’s bedroom. “Wait. What if we’re looking on the wrong side? What if it wasn’t someone involved in the blackmail scam, but a victim?”

“A victim?”

“Yeah. Let’s say it works like this. The blackmail victim is told there’s a DVD showing him in a compromising situation. He’s told to pay up or else.”

“Like the congressman,” Jeremy said. “Except he chose a third option and killed himself.”

“But there’s another alternative that the blackmailers probably hadn’t considered. And that’s the victim turning on the blackmailer.”

“How do you mean?”

“What if the victim doesn’t want to be held up for the rest of his life and can’t afford to be exposed?” Robbie asked. “Then he might try to eliminate all connections to whoever made the video and is trying to blackmail him.”

“So he’d kill Brett because he thought Brett had set him up. Mike for being behind it, and Mike’s henchman for obvious reasons.”

“And he’d try to find and destroy the videos. That’s why Mike’s office was ransacked.”

“And why the man attacked Tyra,” Jeremy said. “Kate said he was looking for the videos.”

Kate. Something was forming in Robbie’s brain.

“But if the victim killed Tyra trying to eliminate the connection to the video,” Jeremy said, “what if Kate was also in the DVD?”

They glanced at each other quickly. “Then Kate would be a target.”

Jeremy’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. The needle on the speedometer moved toward the right. The old car, not in condition for high speeds, shuddered.

“She’ll be okay,” Robbie said. “No one knows Kate’s at your grandfather’s.”

“I know,” Jeremy said. “But someone’s on my tail.”

Robbie turned around. A black car with tinted windows was almost on the bumper of Jeremy’s grandfather’s car. She tried to make out who was driving, but it was impossible.

They were coming up to the dangerous stretch of U.S. 1 where they’d seen the accident earlier. Mangroves and swamps were on either side of the two-lane highway.

Jeremy was pressing down on the accelerator. Robbie read the speedometer. Eighty. Eighty-five. Ninety. The car was shaking hard. The black car was still on their tail. The road signs read “No Passing.”

A slow car was just ahead. Jeremy swerved into the oncoming traffic lane to pass. The black car stayed behind them. The lights of a southbound car were getting brighter.