The Shop (2 page)

It came to Nick Holloway, gradually, that he was lying on cold hard concrete. Something above held him fast. His shirt was hooked on the undercarriage of a car.

He managed to get loose, tearing his shirt in the process, and crawled out from under. Enveloped by the stench of motor oil, shaking and sick, Nick finally realized where he was: the two-car garage beneath the Aspen house.

The last thing he remembered was talking to a guy named Mars at the
Soul Mate
wrap party. He’d never seen Mars before. It was an exclusive wrap party—just Brienne Cross, the contestants and their guests, himself, and the crew. But Nick remembered talking to the mysterious Mars, the two of them sitting on the back deck, the movement of Castle Creek rushing underneath the slats making him dizzy.

After that it was lights-out.

Nick pulled himself to his feet. His legs didn’t work very well, and the smell of flowers and cut lawn sickened him. He became aware of the bright yellow ribbon stretched across the entrance to the garage. Written on the tape were the words “CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS.”

A policeman behind the tape stared in at him, mouth open in shock. Then he started yelling.

A Pitkin County Sheriff’s detective with long legs, big shoes, and a face like a hatchet put him in the front seat of a brown Chevy Caprice, exactly the kind of car Nick had described in his thriller,
Hype
.

“Do you have some ID?” the detective said.

Nick had a question of his own. “Do you know how I ended up in the garage?”

“I thought maybe you could tell me that.”

Nick realized that he had to stare at the air conditioner vent in the cracked dash to avoid spinning. “I have no idea.”

“ID,” the detective reminded him quietly.

Nick shifted to pull his wallet out of his back pocket and nearly passed out. He stared at the vent until the double vision stopped. “Jesus.”

Hatchet Face took the wallet and looked at his driver’s license. “Nick Holloway. I’ve heard that name before.”

“Maybe it was my book,
Hype
. Number thirteen on the
New York Times
Best Seller list.”

“I don’t read. The wife does, though. It’s not about vampires, is it? She loves that stuff.” Hatchet Face had his license out and was tapping it against his leg. “Did you know the people in the house?”

Nick noticed the past tense. He wondered if the cast and crew had blackballed him, but that seemed silly. The aspirin taste seeped into his mouth again—he was going to be sick.

“Mr. Holloway.”

But Nick had already passed out.

They resumed the interview in the emergency room. They had plenty of privacy. It had been two hours, and a nurse had poked her head through the curtain once, ducking out instantly in case anyone asked her for anything. Nick lay in a surgical gown on the crank-abed. Hatchet Face, Detective Derek Sloan, sat on a plastic chair.

“You mean they’re all dead? Brienne? Justin? All of them?”

Nick wasn’t quite able to grasp it, but he knew it was huge. Logically, he understood that he had just escaped death, but in his current state, he was unable to assimilate it.

Sloan switched his ankle from one knee to the other. “You have any idea how you came to be in the garage?”

“Nope.” Nick told the story again: He remembered talking to Mars on the deck. Feeling pretty good. Then looking down at the rushing water between the slats of the deck, feeling sick. “I think I was looking for a bathroom.”

“That’s the last thing you remember?”

“Until I woke up under an oil pan.”

“You were writing an article for
Vanity Fair
?”

“A series, actually. ‘The Reality Show Diaries.’ Not my choice for a title. I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Sucking Up for Fun and Profit.’” Once again it hit home that all of them had been killed. If he hadn’t been in the garage, he would have been killed, too.

The detective questioned him about his presence in the garage at length, and also asked if he knew of anyone who would want to kill everyone in the house. He mentioned white supremacists.

The room began to spin again.

Somebody in blue scrubs bustled in and told Sloan to leave.

The pond behind Jolie Burke’s house was about two-thirds the length of a backyard swimming pool. She figured it would take her eight strokes to reach the opposite bank.

During the day, the pond was opaque. The shadows were deep and almost impossible to look into. Little bubbles spiraled up near the bank where decaying vegetation and cypress trees met.

Never once had she contemplated swimming in it.

That had changed this morning, when Jolie looked at the pond from her yard.

One minute it was a normal day, close and sticky, the sun hot on the top of her head. Her mind was still on her parents’ first home, which she’d walked through the day before.

Then the feeling came up, fast, and gripped her hard. Her heart pounded. Her hands and feet went numb. She couldn’t get her breath.

Jolie knew it was the pond.

She forced herself to move, to turn around and walk back into the house. The feeling of doom followed her into the kitchen. She sat down on a chair at the kitchen table.

She sat in the chair for maybe half an hour. Time seemed to expand. The clock ticked loudly. Her cat, Rex, begged for his food, but she couldn’t stand up to give it to him.

Finally, legs shaking, she rose to her feet and fed the cat, then went to the bedroom and put on the clothes she’d laid out the night before. She left the house and got into the car. By the time she drove into the parking lot at the Palm County Sheriff’s Office, Detective Jolie Burke felt almost normal.

After dinner, she walked out onto the screened-in porch and looked in the direction of the pond. The trees were black against the sky. Between the trunks, she could see the faint glimmer where a slice of moon was reflected in the water.

Jolie made the decision then. She went back to the bedroom and pulled on her swimsuit, nosed her feet into her flip-flops, grabbed a towel from the linen closet, and slapped down the path and through the gate to the pond’s edge.
We’re going to fix this thing once and for all
.

The moment she hit the path, the feeling started to build.

By the time she reached the bank, there was thunder in her ears. Her heart pounded.

Then the chasm started to open up beneath her feet.

Ignore it
.

She stepped up to the edge of the pond. The world seemed to slither from view. Her legs shook. She dug her toes into the damp earth. Whether this would result in a dive or keep her chained to the ground, Jolie wasn’t sure. Just then, the phone rang inside the house.

It startled her so much, she almost sat down. Instead, she sprinted for the back door, thinking:
I’ll be back later, and we’ll finish this
.

The person on the phone was Lonnie Crenshaw, the Palm County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher.

“We have a report of shots fired at the Starliner Motel in Gardenia, and at least one gunshot victim. The victim is deceased. Can you take this?”

“Sure.”

Jolie held on to the phone with one hand and stripped out of her swimsuit with the other. She walked to the closet and eyed blouses and slacks on a row of hangers. Grateful for the distraction. She would put the other stuff—the terrifying notion that this weird phobia was here to stay—out of her mind. “What’s the situation? We’re backup for the Gardenia PD?”

“Negative. They’re asking for one of ours to work the case.” There was a pause. “The deceased is Jim Akers.”

“
Chief
Akers?”

“That’s right. Are you sure you want to take this?”

It took a moment for the magnitude of the situation to sink in. Adrenaline surged as she realized both the opportunity this presented and the possible pitfalls.

“You want Louis to take it?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can. Who’s there?”

“Gardenia PD. We have two units of our own on the way.”

“Tell them to stay out of my scene.”

Gardenia lay twenty-three miles inland from Meridian Beach, on a straight two-lane highway running through flatwood forests, scrubland, and cypress sloughs.

The Starliner Motel was a gray cinder block building with turquoise doors. The office jutted out toward the street. Ten units stretched off to the right. An oleander hedge ran alongside the motel, paralleling the railroad tracks. The oleander’s leaves looked yellow. Maybe it was from the glow of the sodium arc light above, or it could be due to the sulfurous pall cast by the Gardenia paper mill.

A little over a month ago, two people died here. Now there was another death.

Room nine was the second-to-last unit on the end. In addition to the sheriff’s and Gardenia PD units parked out front, Jolie spotted the chief’s navy Crown Vic parked nose-in to the room. A Gardenia PD officer stood just outside the open door to the room. His job was to keep unauthorized people out of the scene. He took it seriously—Horatius at the Bridge.

Jolie put on gloves and booties, took out her camera, and walked past the deputies, giving them a friendly nod. She tried not to be distracted by the smells coming from the room: gunpowder and the stench of meat left out too long.

It didn’t help any that the rotting meat was Jim Akers, a man she’d met on at least four occasions. The thought of him inside this sordid little motel at the edge of town depressed her to a depth she had not expected.

“Are you the responding officer?” Jolie asked the Gardenia cop.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Has anyone else been inside?”

“No, ma’am, I preserved the scene.”

She stepped through the doorway.

The chief lay faceup across the bed. His feet were on the floor, as if he had been sitting on the edge of the bed and then decided to lie back. He wore jeans, a polo shirt, running shoes.

He’d been shot above the right ear. His head was turned to the side, away from the point of entry. Blood seeped into the bedspread like an inkblot. The contents of his head—blood, a few flecks of bone, and brain matter—had been flung against the wall and the headboard like pudding.

I bet you don’t miss a thing
.

Something he’d said to Jolie once. She didn’t recall the context, but he was right about that.

She tried not to miss a thing.

Jolie thought about everything she knew about him, which wasn’t much. He did flirt with her once at a picnic, in an offhand kind of way. It didn’t bother her because there didn’t seem to be anything behind it. She’d seen him with his wife and daughter—they looked like a happy family to her.

Jim Akers was an uncommonly handsome man. Now all that was gone.

Jolie surveyed the room, which reminded her of the places she and her dad had stayed in on their way back from New Mexico. Hundreds of miles a day, but the rooms were all alike. In small towns whose names she’d since forgotten, or places just off the freeway.

She raised the camera and took photos of the man on the bed.

The crime scene technicians came in. Jolie watched them for a while before going outside in the hot, damp air, inhaling the heavy scent of magnolias along with the residual incinerator stink of the paper mill. She could taste the copper of his blood, and every once in a while the spoiled-meat stink seemed to blow out of the room, bloated and huge. She looked at her notes under the porch light.

She wondered what the chief had been thinking, if he knew it was coming. Was there time to think? Did he close his eyes and pray? Or did he just give up and let it happen?

Jolie concentrated on the list of Akers’s possessions: wallet, change, comb, ID, pocket litter.

Something was missing.

Two things, actually. His cell phone, and his service weapon. Jolie doubted that a cop, even an administrative cop, would go anywhere without his service weapon.

And it was strange he had no cell phone. A police chief was on call, always. These days, how many people left their cell phones behind?

She stepped off the walkway and motioned the responding officer over. His nameplate said “Collins.” “Did you know the chief well?”

He seemed calm, but his eyes were like two blue holes in his head—shock. “Yes, ma’am. Pretty well. It’s a small department.”

“What kind of service weapon did he use?”

“An S&W model 66 .357 Magnum. The short barrel. Same as everybody in the PD.”

It occurred to her that there might be another explanation for the missing weapon and phone. It was a fleeting thought—way out of left field. She dismissed it immediately as outlandish.

But the feeling, small and uncomfortable, grew behind her solar plexus.

“What kind of holster?” she asked.

“A belt holster, ma’am. Standard issue.”

She liked his succinctness. “Did he have a backup weapon?”

He stared into the room, watching one of the crime scene techs examining the bloody headboard. The tech was a woman, short and squat, hair done up in an elaborate bun. “He had one in an ankle holster. Don’t know the make or model, though.”

“Did he wear them regularly?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He looked puzzled. “Why wouldn’t he?”

Jolie went back into the room. Gently, she lifted the polo shirt up with a gloved finger.

No belt holster. Not even a belt.

No backup gun, either.