Vengeance (8 page)

A
nd that's why we must take a stand against moral corruption and hypocrisy,” Delilah Barrister finished her speech to the room full of Washington State Ladies for Family Values, “for the sake of our children, and the city!”

The audience erupted in applause. Val watched from the back of the room, keeping a low profile until the end of the meeting. It'd been a fight to get Max to wait in the car again, but he eventually relented after she convinced him talking to Delilah would be a walk in the park compared to her psycho husband. And with Sten and his assassination squad on her tail, it was important they weren't seen together. If Val could get Delilah alone and build a rapport with her, woman to woman, maybe she'd trust Val enough to spill whatever she knew about the connection between Norman and Lester, and how they were tied to Robby's murder.

As the ladies got up and began shaking hands and gathering their purses, Val did one last scan for cops or security who might ID her; still none, thank God.

When only a few women lingered, Val approached. “Hi again,” she said with a friendly smile.

Delilah looked up from the papers she'd been gathering. “Oh, hello, Miss…Shepherd, was it?”

“You can call me Val. I'd like to talk to you about Colonel Barrister, if you don't mind. Do you have a moment?”

“Of course. Let's go to my office.”

Val followed Delilah into a modest office with pictures of Washington State forest landscapes on the walls along with half a dozen certificates of appreciation. Atop the desk sat a fresh bouquet of flowers, next to a brass plaque that read “President.” At Delilah's gesture, she sat down in one of the two seats in front of the desk.

Delilah took the other seat, crossed her legs, and leaned toward Val. “What can I do for you?”

Val laced her fingers on her lap and considered her words carefully. After thirty-something years of marriage, Delilah was in the best position to know what kind of man Norman was behind his carefully controlled public persona. True, many people chose to stay ignorant of their spouse's transgressions if facing reality could result in the loss of their cushy lifestyles. Val didn't know what went on between Delilah and Norman behind closed doors, but Norman definitely had a temper. If his wife feared him, she might be willing to turn on him and help Val in exchange for getting Norman out of her life.

“As I'm sure you know, sometimes people come back from war changed,” Val said, “usually not for the better.”

Delilah's mouth fell into a slight frown. “What do you mean?”

“When I visited Colonel Barrister today, he seemed…off. Not the same man I used to know.” That was a lie—Val always knew Barrister to be a two-faced bastard, but pretending to see it for the first time might bring Delilah around to her own realization. “He was more, I don't know”—Val cringed like it pained her to say it—“
violent
.”

Delilah sat back in her chair. She gripped the armrests and swallowed hard. After a long pause, she said, “He's had a hard time readjusting to civilian life. It takes a toll on you, all those years of fighting. You've been there. You know.”

Yes, Val had been there. She'd been broken down and put back together again, to fight for Uncle Sam in one ultimately pointless skirmish after another. She might've had sympathy for Barrister if she thought he suffered from something like post-traumatic stress disorder, and wasn't naturally a cat-killing, woman-hating, homophobic hypocrite.

“He's changed, and…” Delilah's eyes filled with tears. “Sometimes he scares me.”

Val leaned forward. “Has he hurt you?”

“Not yet, but…” Delilah shook her head.

“Has he hurt other people? Is he involved in anything…not right? Maybe illegal?”

Norman's wife narrowed her eyes at Val, suddenly suspicious. “Of course not. Why would I know that?”

She'd pushed too hard. Time to try a different tactic. “Listen, I'm going to be honest with you. I've been hired by Maxwell Carressa to look into his father's death and help exonerate him. The information I've discovered so far has led me to believe your husband is involved.”

Delilah's eyes widened. “What information?”

“I can't divulge that right now. But the evidence is strong. I just don't know exactly
how
Norman is involved.”

“Oh my God…”

“Delilah, I could help you. We could help each other. Your husband scares you, he's been unfaithful—”

“
What?
” Delilah sat up straight in her chair, anger overriding her shock.

“I'm sorry, it's true.”

The prim woman said nothing for several seconds, clenching and unclenching her jaw as if she literally chewed on the information. Finally, she spat, “What do you want from me?”

“Give me evidence of Norman's involvement in Lester Carressa's death, or anything that might tie him to the death of Robert Price, Max Carressa's lawyer.”

“I—I don't know anything about that.”

“Come on, Delilah,” Val said, her patience waning. “You're a smart woman. You must know something. You live with the man. If you help me, I'll make sure you're safe and help you leave him—”

“I can't leave my husband! I'd have nothing! I can't put my son through a messy divorce. I'd lose my position here. Everyone would
know
. I can't—” She launched from her seat, her back rigid. “Thank you for coming by, Miss Shepherd, but I really need to get back to my work. Though it was very nice talking to you, I have a lot of errands I must run today.”

“Please let me help you,” Val said as she stood. “No one should live in fear in their own home.”

Eyes still awash in tears, Delilah shook her head.

Goddammit.
She'd been so close to a possible breakthrough in her search to find Robby's killer. Why did Delilah have to be so goddamn stubborn? Sure, Val knew women in abusive relationships often went to great lengths to protect their abusers, but Delilah's main concern seemed to revolve around maintaining her perfect housewife image. Avoiding a painful divorce wasn't worth running the risk of being beaten to death.

Val swallowed a sigh. The sympathy gambit had failed. Delilah had made herself clear; now wasn't the right time. If Val pushed too hard, Delilah might never come around. “If you change your mind, please call my office—Valentine Investigations. Our contact info is on the website. I'm, um, in between phones right now, but my assistant can help you or put you through to me.”

Delilah nodded and folded her arms, waiting for Val to leave.

With no choice, Val obliged her. At least there was still Lester Carressa's study to search. Maybe the day would conclude on something other than a depressing dead end.

M
ax stood at the threshold of his father's third-floor study and watched Val inspect Lester's bookshelves, end tables, glass desk, and glass display cases, until she finally stepped through the sliding glass door and onto the balcony. Lester loved glass. It gave the illusion that he had nothing to hide, which every magician knows is the perfect front for deception.

“Wow,” Val said as she leaned over the railing and looked straight down to the rocky eaves that led to the waters of Lake Washington. “That's quite a drop.”

“He liked to live dangerously,” Max said. As he stepped into the room, a wave of irrational dread spread over him, like he expected the shadows to coalesce into the specter of his father and take over his life again.

He's dead
, Max admonished himself,
Stop acting like a child.
He closed his eyes for a moment, focused himself on the task at hand, then reopened them with a new resolve strengthened by cold logic.

“Are you all right?” Val asked as she came back inside and slid the door closed behind her. “You look a little pale. If it makes you uncomfortable to be in here, I can dig through the room alone and let you know if I need help.”

“There's nothing wrong with me,” he said through clenched teeth. He took a breath and tempered the anger in his voice—anger at himself for letting his father get to him from beyond the grave. “You can tear this place apart all you want, but you'll never get through the computer files by yourself.” He nodded at the sleek white laptop perched on the desk. “Most of them are probably password-protected.”

She shrugged. “Okay, then.”

He sat down in front of the computer and fired it up while Val pulled a folder from a neat row of them populating two bookshelves. He didn't expect her to find anything in his father's hardcopy files—old, miscellaneous papers Lester hadn't gotten around to shredding—but if it kept her occupied and out of immediate danger, then he'd play along.

Max still wasn't sure if this supposed conspiracy involving his father, Norman Barrister, and Robby Price's death was a real thing or just a series of coincidences. Meaningless concurrences were a lot more common than people believed, on account of the general public's poor understanding of probability. In fact, the chance that they weren't related hovered around seventy-three percent, by his back-of-the-envelope calculations. He could always try to check with a vision, but she wasn't up for it and it seemed inappropriate for him to do it himself with a houseguest in close proximity. In any case, whether or not they were related didn't change the fact that Val had witnessed Chet's murder, and his killers had an incentive to want her gone. She was safer with him than on her own.

And selfish as it was, he liked having her around. She was beautiful, smart, and tough, but above all she understood him, knew what it was like to bear a hidden curse that tore you apart from the inside. She'd experienced the long, locked-in-a-room-screaming torture that was a life of being completely alone in the world—well, not alone anymore. They had each other now, courtesy of Robby's death.

Max cringed. He shouldn't think like that. Max's junior lawyer had been a much better person than him. Robby deserved to be with Val, not Max. But…if Max and Val had discovered each other under different circumstances, been in healthier places in their lives and unattached, maybe they'd be more than…whatever they were. A woman obsessed with avenging her dead fiancé and a man accused of patricide, working together because they had no one else. The stuff fairy tales were made of.

He gave his head a small shake and turned his attention back to the computer. No sense dwelling on fantasies. She might understand him, but she didn't
know
him. He wanted to let her in, but if he did, she'd take off in a heartbeat, no matter their shared curse.

It took Max two guesses on a variation of his father's usual password to unlock the laptop. From there, he clicked through dozens of folders, each with dozens more files nested inside, and scanned the documents within. He spent the better part of two hours parsing through information he either already knew or was irrelevant to their search; no mention of Norman Barrister whatsoever. Val sat cross-legged on the floor, piles of paper strewn around her and growing larger as she read a document, found nothing, then tossed it to the side.

Rather than continue on this wild-goose chase, the best course of action for them was to just leave. They could go to Argentina, or Fiji, or Shanghai—anywhere in the world—until the mayoral election was over and the heat died down, then return. Or not. He could run Carressa Industries from afar or, better yet, sell the company and walk away from the past. Of course, there wasn't a chance in hell Val would go along with that plan, and he couldn't abandon her to her fate, even if it meant his own downfall. She was a good person—loyal, brave, and on the side of justice. The world would be worse without her; him, not so much.

“Who's Lydia?” Val asked, looking up from a clutch of college-ruled papers in one hand and a notebook in the other.

“My mother. She died in a car accident when I was twelve, shortly after I started having visions. Why?”

“This journal has your mother's name on it.” She blew dust off the cover. “It's filled with random notes, like to-do and shopping lists.”

“I remember my mom kept notebooks with her. Such was life in the era before smart phones. She was very organized.”

Val held up the papers. “These fell out. They're love letters.”

Max took them from her and flipped through almost a dozen short, handwritten declarations of love, none of them signed. Nausea gripped his stomach.

Val smiled. “Your dad was a real romantic.”

“No, he wasn't. And this isn't his handwriting.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Your mom was having an affair? Maybe with Barrister?”

“According to Chet, Barrister's a closeted gay man, so I doubt that.”

“Maybe Barrister's bisexual.”

Max threw down the letters. “No.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose as the first throbs of a migraine coursed through his head. “Whatever these are, they're irrelevant, so let's move on.”

Val studied him silently, her cool gray eyes searching his face for a reason why he'd so thoroughly shut down a potential lead. His reason was a stupid one: he didn't want to know. His mother had been the only person in his life who ever truly loved him. He couldn't lose her again.

He'd already resigned himself to accepting she'd died in a car accident, though the close timing of her death and the discovery of his ability always had him doubting. Lester had done lots of terrible things no one but Max knew about. Why not murder? It wouldn't even be the worst thing Lester had ever done. Not that Max could prove any of it. Maybe this possible affair was one step toward that—no. He wouldn't get his hopes up again. Hope only led to crushing disappointment, then despair, then drugs, then guns—

Stop. Think about something else.
Max swiveled his chair back to the computer and resumed pounding away at it, his hands trembling but determined. This time, he pulled up his father's old e-mails. He had about an hour until the migraine took over his brain and he became useless. Best not to waste time agonizing over the past.

Thankfully, Val didn't press the issue. She stood and stepped out of her circle of papers, then started pulling books off the shelves and tossing them into the middle of the room.

When he raised an eyebrow at her book throwing, she said, “Families that keep secrets from each other are good at hiding things, often right under each other's noses. I'm guessing there are more gems in here.”

Max wanted to tell her to stop, but he didn't want to explain why. Were his own secrets hidden in this room as well? He swallowed hard and let her turn the formerly pristine office inside out.

Orange light glinted off the office's many glass surfaces as the sun began to dip below the horizon. Like a spilled inkwell, the pain in Max's head spread from his temples and crept into the minute crevices of his brain until it was only with great effort that he could read an e-mail, recognize its irrelevance, and discard it. When he was about to give up for the day, he opened an e-mail that had been sent to his father about a month before he died, with no subject, no originating address, and only two lines:

Per our deal, we expect the grandchild upon delivery. Don't force us to directly intervene.

Max stared at the laptop screen as the pain in his head was overpowered for a moment by the fierce pounding of his heart, threatening to burst from his chest. Did this message mean what he thought it meant? Was this why his father had pushed him to find someone and settle down, even though he'd had a vasectomy years ago to make sure he could never have children and pass on his curse? Why Lester had gotten violent for the first time in over a decade?
Don't force us to
directly
intervene
—

“Bingo,” Val said behind him. He turned and saw her kneeling beside a three-foot-by-two-foot safe that'd been hidden behind a false wooden panel in the wall, next to a display case she'd pushed aside. She looked at him and frowned. “Okay, now you really look like you're going to puke. Do you need to lie down or something?”

“I've got a headache.” He closed the laptop. “I'll be fine.” He'd tell her about the mysterious e-mail later. If he told her now, she'd start asking questions he didn't want to answer.

She furrowed her brows, unsatisfied with his response. The last rays of the setting sun caught the sheen of her strawberry-colored hair, and she tucked a lock of it behind her ear so it framed her delicate face, dominated by those steely eyes. He remembered the glimpses he'd caught of her disrobing in his house, how beautiful she was—slim and athletic—and his pain eased for a short moment. After a few seconds of staring at each other, she looked away, her cheeks flushed, and the pain rushed back as he kicked himself for reducing a woman he respected to a sex object.

“Do you know the code?” Val asked him, looking at the safe's electronic combination lock.

Max rubbed his temples and forced the cogs in his head to turn. “Try one-eight-six-zero-zero-three-five-nine-eight.”

She punched in the numbers; the safe stayed locked. “Any other guesses?”

He glanced around his father's desk and opened the top drawer, where pens and paper clips rattled about. Inside, he found a sticky note with the word “ASCENSION” written on it. “Try two-seven-nine-five-four-two-four-four-two.”

Val entered the numbers and the safe clicked open. “Nice. How'd you know?”

“The first try was my father's social security number, and the second was my father's social security number with the numeric place in the alphabet of each letter in the word ‘ascension' added to each corresponding number, accounting for the rollover after the number nine back to zero.”

“You
guessed that
?” Val gawked at him. “You told me you were ‘decent' at math. My sister was decent at math. You sound better than decent.”

He shrugged. She rolled her eyes at him, then started pulling things out of the safe. She handed him a large stack of twenty-dollar bills. Max flipped through it; fifteen thousand dollars in cash.

“I didn't know you had a sister,” he said, putting the money on the desk.

“I did.” She put a stack of receipts and accounting documents in his lap.

“Where is she now?”

“Dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

She looked at him with eyes tinged with sadness and gave him a weary smile. “Yeah, well, yet another example of how seeing the future can be totally useless when you only have minimal control over what you see, and most things can't be changed.”

“
Most
things?” Maybe the vicious throbbing in his head had caused him to hear her wrong. “Nothing can be changed. I've tried. Ethan's tried.”

She pulled a revolver out of the safe and turned it around in her hands. “Maybe you didn't try hard enough.” She flipped the cylinder open. “Two bullets? Who only loads two bullets?” Val put the gun on top of the stack of papers in his lap, and continued digging.

Before Max could question her further about the impossibility of what she'd just said, a familiar notch on the gun's handgrip caught his eye. He picked it up and read the serial number—yes, this was the one, his father's old revolver that Max remembered from his teenage years. He thought Lester had gotten rid of the unassuming Smith & Wesson Model 60 after Max's “accident.” He'd thought wrong. His eyes traced the barrel and the perfect circle at its terminus, and in a flash he remembered the coldness of the metal when he'd pressed it against his temple and pulled the trigger—

Max's vision blurred and his hearing dulled. His hands began to shake.

Son of a bitch, not now.

He shot up from his seat, knocking the papers and gun to the ground. He laid his palms flat on the desk, hung his head below his shoulders, and gasped for breath as he tried to control his panic attack.

Stop it, stop it, stop it—

He felt a hand on his back. “Max, sit down over here—”

“No!” He jerked away from Val's touch. His voice sounded muffled to his ears, like he spoke through a pillow. “It's my headache. My head hurts. I need my medicine.”

He should've taken Val up on her offer to search the office without him. It'd been months since he'd had a panic attack, and now he was regressing in front of an audience.

To hell with my father, and to hell with this fucking house and the fucking company and fucking everything.

He stumbled for the exit, desperate to get away from the ghosts of the past that haunted him.