The Blind (8 page)

Saturday, October 31
9:35 a.m.

A
t five-foot-two, Evie was closer to the ground than most people, which meant she could get a better look at their feet, and this morning, her world revolved around feet.

Captain Ricci stood at a podium set up on the scarred earth of the Central Branch of the L.A. Public Library. At his elbow was a six-foot blowup of Carter Vandemere's signature.

“Anyone who has seen or purchased artwork by an individual using this name should contact the Angel Bomber hotline,” Ricci was saying to the group of fifty-plus journalists gathered in the courtyard. “This individual may also go by the initial
V
and use the same angled slant to the letter.”

Behind Ricci stood Jack along with representatives of each of the law enforcement agencies working the case. Cho was representing the FBI, a good call because Evie needed to be on the streets looking at feet.

The man who'd taken a shot at her and Jack was still on the loose. If he had anything to do with the bombings, it was possible he showed up at the press conference to watch the chaos he was creating. Bombers weren't overly social, so she was looking for a man set off from the crowd. She strolled past the library's fountain area where mothers sat with baby strollers.

She rammed a wayward lock of hair out of her face. Hell, he could even be here looking for his next victims, a brown-haired woman and a blond infant. She wound through Saturday-morning joggers, checked out the bus stop, and poked her head into a sandwich shop.

When she reached a coffee shop, she jammed her hands on her hips. “Dammit, Freddy, stop following me.”

“Man, you're good,” a voice from behind her quipped. “You got eyes in the back of your head?”

She turned and aimed an arched eyebrow at the tabloid journalist who'd been on her tail all morning. “I smelled you.” She fanned away his sickly sweet breath. “What is that?”

“Wacky Watermelon.” He slicked a wad of neon green gum over his tongue and blew a bubble that looked like nuclear waste. “It's supposed to keep my mouth occupied so I give up the cigs. Doc says I'm a few sticks away from stroking out.”

“Unless the toxic gum kills you first.”

Freddy leaned in and said under his breath, “You're looking for him, aren't you? You're thinking he may be here getting a boner over all this attention.”

She pushed him away. “Shouldn't you be out shooting cheating celebrities or strung-out rock stars?”

“I belong right here at your side, and you know it.” He nudged his shoulder against hers and waggled his eyebrows. “Ask me; I know you want to.”

Freddy was smarter than he looked. “Okay, Freddy. Does anyone in this crowd look like anyone in the crowd outside the library when Lisa Franco was killed?”

He stopped blowing bubbles. “No, and I've been looking.” He dug into his man purse and took out a small photo album. “Here are some shots of the crowd from the third bombing. I isolated the onlookers who fit your profile, blew them up, and cleaned up their features.”

As she flipped through the photos, she had to give kudos to Freddy. Ricci had an LAPD uniform shooting the crowd for facial recognition and comparison, but Freddy's doctored shots could be useful. “Good move. Can I keep these?”

Freddy put his hand on his heart. “For you,
mi corazón
, anything.”

She jabbed the album into her bag and took off, the photographer keeping pace alongside her. In little doses, he wasn't
that
bad. While she searched for big feet, Freddy snapped photos. On her second loop around the fountain, Jack finally took to the podium.

“I'm Jack Elliott, and I live and work downtown,” Jack started. Every eye, every ear in the plaza turned to him. “An evil has invaded my neighborhood, destroying lives and property and peace of mind. People are afraid to shop and dine and meet with friends. Small businesses are feeling the fallout from the bomb. I'm encouraging all of my neighbors, employees, and colleagues to work with Captain Ricci's team. Be watchful and report any suspicious characters and activities. Residents have set up…”

Authoritative. Earnest. Compelling. And from the heart. Because Jack's heart was very much involved. His private art collection was being used as the basis for the bombings, and his sister, at the time of her death, had been wearing custom jewelry that ended up in the bomber's portfolio.

Freddy pointed to the dais where her colleague, Steve Cho, now stood and was saying, “In each previous bombing, the improvised explosive device has been encased in a fanny pack with the ignition fully visible.”

“Why aren't you up there, Lady Feeb?” Freddy asked.

“I don't have the right temperament.”

Freddy waggled his eyebrows. “You hit someone once, didn't you?”

“Not during a press conference.”

“After?” A grin, more impish than smarmy, slipped onto his lips.

“I'm not the kind of girl to hit and tell.”

Freddy laughed, then cradled his lip with his hand. The swelling had gone down, but the skin was blackish purple.

“How's your lip?” Evie asked.

“Still attached to my mouth.”

At the dais, Ricci took over at the podium. “And now we'll take questions.”

A reporter with a handheld recorder hopped to his feet. “Do you have any indication when and where he'll strike next?”

The press conference had been carefully scripted up to this point, each participant playing a role in disseminating specific information. Ricci would tread carefully here. He couldn't tip off too much to the bomber. At this point they were holding back the connection to the
Beauty Through the Ages
collection. “We don't know when, but we're assuming it will be sometime next week and that he will continue to work the downtown area.”

“What are you doing to safeguard area residents?”

The questions and answers flew, and Evie shifted from shoes to heads. She scanned the area for faces. No one with barely contained glee. No one with a smug smirk of superiority. No one with a marked emotional release. She checked her watch. And no more time. In four minutes she and Jack would head to LAX. While most of the team would be working the streets of downtown L.A., she and Jack would be flying to southwestern Pennsylvania.

“Listen, Freddy, I'm heading out of town for the day. Let me know if you get any matches on the faces. And there's one more thing.” She dug into her purse and took out a wad of bills and counted. “Here's two hundred fifty-six dollars and”—she reached into the front pocket of her jeans—“twenty-six cents.”

Freddy waved off the money. “Don't even try and back out on our deal, Lady Feeb. You promised me an exclusive once we find Bomber Boy.”

“We're still on. Consider this a tip for service above and beyond.” She patted her bag where the photo album was stashed. “I want you to find a fast horse and play one on me. If you win, pay Skip that next installment.”

“You're fuckin' serious?”

“I need you in one piece, Freddy.” A guy who had all those pictures of his nieces on his dresser couldn't be that bad. “Anyway, I had someone in my life who took a chance on me when no one else would.” She smoothed the wild hair over her right ear.

He wiggled his fingers in front of his chest. “Ooooo, I sense a juicy story.”

“It is.” She took his hand, opened his fingers, slapped the money on his palm, and took off to get Jack.

9:41 a.m.

The bitter, black brew scalded Carter Vandemere's throat. Just the way he liked it.

“Want me to top that off?” The woman behind the counter held up a coffeepot.

“I'm good,” he said. He was beyond good. He was notoriously good. A giggle jiggled the seared flesh of his throat.

On the television in the corner of The Bean Thing where he'd spent a beautiful Saturday morning watching the sun, people were lining up to talk about him. This. This was what he wanted, dreamed of for the past decade. People seeing his art, acknowledging his masterful work. His art, while certainly not traditional, made people feel, and good art—no, great art—did just that. The stronger the emotion, the more powerful the art. The more powerful the art, the more masterful the artist. For the past three months he'd incited shock, horror, and bone-chilling fear. But until now, he hadn't received the adulation he deserved.

He credited the little FBI agent, the one with the red boots and eyes the color of steamy espresso. When she exploded onto the scene, things changed; most important, things with Jack Elliott changed.

He took another long, blistering swig. The big-shot businessman and art collector had ignored him. Stupid, stupid man. Hot brown liquid sloshed over the rim and splashed onto his hand, leaving a brilliant scarlet streak. Another beautiful shade of red. But now, he finally had Jack Elliott's attention, and he couldn't wait until Jack saw his latest installation, the one he'd personally set up and displayed in Jack's desk drawer.

Saturday, October 31
5:11 p.m.

R
umble.
Craaaaack.

Lightning spidered the sky as Jack straightened his tie tack, then held open the door to the art boutique.

Always the gentleman. Always in control. But Evie knew better. On the flight from L.A. to southwestern Pennsylvania, Jack had been in business mode, taking comfort in what was familiar and known, business. With Evie, he'd determined goals, identified strategies, made an action plan, and prepared to execute. He'd been singularly focused on the investigation to identify how the Angel Bomber was connected to his dead sister, Abby.

As for what was simmering under his purposeful work, Evie had seen the whitening of his knuckles when they touched down and a flash of sadness in his eyes when they walked out the jet's door and into the cold, gray windy day. He was visiting his hometown for the first time in fifteen years, the place where his sister had died after slipping through his fingers.

Squeezing Jack's hand, she walked into the boutique in search of a killer. The shop smelled of pine and candle wax and was filled with artisan batik quilts, grainy wooden bowls, handblown glass, and jewelry.

A white-haired woman waved from behind a counter where she was ringing up a set of large glass goblets. “Be with you in a minute, dears.”

Jack took Evie by the elbow. “Custom jewelry is over here,” he said.

The muscles along the back of her arm tensed, but she didn't pull away. Nor did she jab him in the gut, a not-so-gentle reminder that she didn't like being led around. Jack had taken some hard blows lately, but unlike Freddy, he didn't sport a fat lip. Jack had been slammed in the gut.

The bomber clearly knew Abby. He'd painted her portrait and in all of his artwork had used the sun motif that was so important to her. He could have been one of Abby's friends, the bagger at the grocery store where Abby bought vanilla ice cream, the kid in the back row of art class, or the artist who created the sun jewelry.

“Does anything look familiar?” Evie asked.

Jack studied the tiny boxes of rings and pendants and earrings. “Nothing stands out.” His jaw squared and tightened. She could see the frustration welling. Jack wasn't used to dealing with unknowns.

“Good afternoon, kids.” The woman with the white hair slipped behind the jewelry counter. “Looking for wedding rings today?”

“Wedding?” Evie could barely get the word out. Jack looked equally aghast.

He was the first to recover. “No rings today. We're not looking for a specific piece but a particular artist, someone who works in silver and makes items like this.” He held out the silver pendant from his key ring.

“That doesn't look familiar.”

“I purchased this piece at a local art fair about fifteen years ago.”

“Fifteen years?” She held the pendant up to the artificial light. “You know, this might be one of Harris Kerr's. He works with mostly large metal pieces now, but I think when he was first starting out, he might have done some jewelry work.”

“Do you know how we can get in touch with him?” Evie asked.

“He doesn't have a phone. No Internet. He's one of those brooding artist types. Just leave him alone and let him create, but I think I may have his address as a few years ago I had to mail him a commission check for a piece of his we sold.”

6:42 p.m.

“I've never seen so much barbed wire in my life.” Jack pulled the rental car up to the gate of Harris Kerr's property, a few wooded acres off the Monongahela River, lit up tonight like the outer perimeter of a maximum security prison.

“Technically that's concertina wire.” Evie pointed to the top of the eight-foot chain-link fence. “That's barbed wire, and that one along the side is a lovely little piece of art called razor-ribbon wire.”

“Since he probably doesn't have any executive assistant we can tap, any plans to get us into his fortress?” Jack asked.

“He knows we're here.” She pointed at a camera mounted on a post at the front gate. Then she took out her shield and held it up to the camera. The camera whirred, zooming in. “Let's hope he chooses to do this the easy way.”

Nothing had ever come easy to Jack, which was fine. He'd worked since the age of twelve, mowing lawns and shoveling snow. He didn't mind working hard. Just the opposite. He loved pouring himself into a project. He loved racing to the finish line and notching the win. But this project, the investigation into his dead sister's ties with a bomber, was eating at his gut. Had his sister known the bomber calling himself Carter Vandemere? Had he been warped and twisted back then? Had Abby sat for him? Had he hurt her?

A hand settled on his arm. Evie's. She nodded to the gate swinging open. “Looks like he's going to play nicely.”

Jack threaded the car along the pocked driveway. The wind had picked up, and lightning continued to streak the inky sky. “Do you really think this could be Carter Vandemere?”

Evie was quiet a moment. These bits of quiet from the fiery FBI agent at first surprised him, but he was learning that Evie wasn't all fire and brimstone. She had a contemplative side, when the hair atop her head tilted to the right and her big brown eyes narrowed. “The location concerns me,” Evie finally said. “Vandemere knows L.A., and unless this Kerr fellow has some West Coast property, I'm not sure if I can buy into his involvement.”

The first thing Jack noticed about Harris Kerr was his eyes. They refused to meet his. In a business deal, that would have sent Jack out the door. Then Jack noticed the hands. Three fingertips were missing from the left hand along with the pinky on his right.

“The things we sacrifice for the sake of art.” Kerr held up his hands, gazing at them as if they, too, were works of art. Jack only saw the hands of a possible killer.

“Please show us your workshop,” Evie said with a bluntness he'd come to expect, not because she was rude but because time was of the essence. Tomorrow was the first day of November.

The first icy raindrop fell as Kerr led them to a garage behind the small trailer that was his home. There Jack saw stacks of steel sheets, pyramids of pipes, saws, grinders, and cans of paint. Next to him Evie sent a sweeping gaze through the shop. Did she see traces of a killer? Bits of a bomber?

She walked slowly around the room, her boot heels tapping the cement. She stopped at the workbench holding coffee canisters full of nails and screws and wire. “Do you make jewelry?”

“Ahhhh, the commercial cash cow.” Derision dripped from Kerr's voice. “Yes, I was guilty of sucking on that teat once in my career.”

She handed him the sun pendant. “Is this one of yours?”

Kerr plucked a loupe from the desk and held the pendant under a lamp. “That's one of mine. I also made a matching pair of earrings.”

“Only one?” Jack asked, the question as sharp as the wire that lined this place. If the answer was yes, the earring used in the second bombing belonged to Abby.

“All of my pieces are one-of-a-kind originals. Where did you get this?”

“I bought it for my sister at an art fair in town fifteen years ago.”

“The blonde with the pretty blue eyes.”

“You remember her?”

“Super fans are good for an artist's ego. She loved my work, fell head over heels with the sun set, but was crushed when she found out the price. I wished I could have cut her a deal, but I was doing the whole starving artist thing and couldn't let the piece go.”

Evie poked through the coffee canisters, metal clinking and clanking. “Have you ever been to Los Angeles?”

“California? Never. Why do you ask?”

Because I want this to end here
, Jack thought.
I want you to be the Angel Bomber so we can put an end to the death and destruction of human life. And so you can tell me where to find Abby's body so I can lay her to rest.

“When was the last time you flew on a plane?” Evie continued.

“I've never flown. I'm quite happy right here.”

Evie pulled out the mangled earring from her bag, a one-inch piece of twisted silver that sent Jack's insides quaking. “Is this one of yours?”

Again, Kerr settled the loupe on his eye. “Absolutely. This is from the same set as the pendant. There's a hash mark on the back where I soldered the sun to the loop.”

Abby's earring. The one she'd worn in death. Which means someone had found her body. Jack's fist tightened. Because while Harris Kerr was not the bomber, he'd dropped a bombshell.

Sheets of icy rain fell from the sky as they left Kerr's shop, but Jack didn't feel the biting bullets. “Carter Vandemere found her body,” Jack said when they got into the car. “He touched her and took the earring.”

“We don't know that for sure.”

“You do, Evie.” He spun on her, daring her to call him wrong. “You're like me. You work from the gut. You trust what's in your core. Tell me, what's your gut telling you?”

Her hands were in her lap, fisting and flexing. “That the bomber was obsessed with your sister, he knew her before her death, and he somehow got his hands on her earrings. And that right now we need to find out who your sister was hanging around with before she died.”

He jammed the keys in the ignition and twisted hard. “I know where to start.”

“Where?”

The one place whose black, gritty dust he'd wiped from the soles of his shoes and swore he'd never see again. “My home.”

7:55 p.m.

Jack secured the parking brake. The roads in this neighborhood were hilly, pocked, and strewn with loose gravel. They hadn't changed much in fifteen years. “Zoe lives in the blue house on the right,” he said as he reached for the keys in the ignition switch.

“Which means you grew up in the yellow one.” Evie squinted through the windshield where the wipers blasted at full speed. “That's a great tree in the front yard. Bet you had a ball climbing it.”

His hand hovering over the keys, he studied Evie, who was in turn studying the rows of tiny dilapidated houses and him. She was in bomb tech mode, checking out the landscape, looking for anything that might go boom. In other words, she was worried about him.

“I did.” Jack rested his wrists on the steering wheel. “For the record, we didn't have a horrible childhood. I don't remember much about Dad, other than he loved to work with wood. On the weekends he'd go out in the garage and build things, chairs, cabinets, picture frames. That's where Abby got her artistic ability. As for Mom, she worked hard and never complained about going without. Abby, when she was in her sunny place, she could light up a room.”

“But you wanted to get out of here? Like Abby, did you need more sun and light?”

“I needed more life. This is a dead town covered in black dust.” He scrubbed his hands along his arms. “It's called coke and settles into everything, the sidewalks, the rain, your skin.”

“Not a beautiful place.”

“Definitely not.” He switched off the car. “I tried to talk Mom into leaving, but she refused. She died two years after I left. Pancreatic cancer. No one knew because she didn't have insurance and didn't see a doctor.”

Before he reached for the door handle, Evie grabbed his arm. “You don't need to go in. This could be headed to some pretty dark places.”

“I know.” Dark thoughts had been slamming his skull. Was the person now calling himself Carter Vandemere watching Abby at the river? Did he have anything to do with the accident? Was he one of the searchers? Did he find Abby's lifeless body? And most important, if he did, what had he done with it? “That darkness is the reason I need to be here.”

“You do realize that I have the power to bar you from anything to do with this case, don't you?”

“You won't.”

Her mouth quirked in irritation. “What makes you so confident?”

Evie wore her heart on her sleeve for all the world to see. “You'll do just about anything to find the Angel Bomber, and you'll use any means and resources, including my pains and past, to get him.”

Guilt washed across Evie's face.

He settled his finger under her chin and brought her gaze back to his. “I'm the type who appreciates and admires that kind of passion and drive.”

Craaaaack
.

Another bolt of lightning split the sky.

They ducked through the rain, which was on its way to sleet, and knocked on Zoe's door. Zoe Sobeski grew up in the house next to his and had been Abby's best friend, and unlike him, she'd never been able to shake the old neighborhood, first caring for her ailing mother, then taking over the house when her mother died. Zoe knew Abby's friends, dreams, and fears.

The door swung open, framing a woman with a bulging midsection and a little princess in her arms. The corners of his lips turned up.

The woman's eyes widened. “Jackie? Jackie Elliott?” She put the princess on the floor and wrapped Jack in a bear hug. Then Zoe held him at arm's length and turned him as if inspecting a coat for possible purchase. “Man, Jackie, you grew up good, and you smell good, too.” A hand smoothed the side of her hair while the other tugged the baggy shirt over her very pregnant midsection. “I'm a mess. Dan and I have been at a Halloween carnival with the kids all day.”

Today was Halloween? He hadn't even noticed. Next to him, Evie looked equally surprised.

“You look beautiful, Zoe,” he said.

“You must be having eye problems.” She pulled him into the house, where in addition to the little princess, there was a little clown and an even littler hobo. With her toe, she nudged away a toy fire truck and four Barbie dolls. “Who's your friend?”

“
Agent
Evie Jimenez.” Evie took out a thin wallet, and with a snap of her wrist, showed Zoe her badge. The movement was so natural, the badge could have been an extension of her hand.