Terrance gave a sidelong look at Roger and continued. "Billy knew his days were numbered.
He wanted an insurance policy, especially if Broadband Access Media was a success. He wanted our help to make sure Spinotta didn't get rid of him. But then Spinotta told us about his plan. To come out here. To save boys. Broadband Access Media was just a front to get money for this place. So Billy came up with a plan that made everyone happy. We convinced Joseph to let us come with him and help. And before we left, we convinced him to sign everything over to Billy."
A young boy's peal of laughter rang from somewhere deep within the house. This place was not the perverse sexual playground that I had imagined. The boys had no memory of the sexual abuse they suffered. They had not been present for the murder I had witnessed earlier. Whatever panic and dislocation they felt from being ripped from their families, they were not destined to grow up to be Everett, furiously sexual, murderously violent. Yet the young man I knew as Everett had lived here as well. He had been sent to live with Billy at the age of sixteen, and I couldn't figure out why.
'What's supposed to happen to these boys when they grow up?" I asked.
It was Roger Vasquez who answered. "We set up accounts for them," he said with evident pride. "With the money we steal from our customers."
Behind Roger, Terrance Davidson had gone white, his blazing eyes fixed on my face. The topic of the young boys' fate had rattled him. "They're allowed to leave at a time of their own choosing," Roger went on. 'We won't force them. When the time comes, they can reenter the world as new men."
His answer baffled me. Terrance took a step forward, his jaw quivering.
'What about Everett?" I asked.
Now it was Roger's turn to go white.
"Jim Clark," I said.
Roger got to his feet, glaring at me as if I had grown another head. Terrance shot forward and pulled the pistol from the supply belt on Roger's hip. The breath went out of me. I braced myself for a gunshot, even though I wasn't sure how I had earned it.
But it was Roger who was staring at the barrel of his own pistol. "I'm sorry, Roger,"
Terrance Davidson whispered. "We couldn't do it."
"What the hell's going on?" Caroline demanded.
"It's all right!" I shouted. A pleading look had risen in Terrance Davidson's eyes, even as he aimed the pistol at Roger's face.
"Everett was a problem." Terrance sighed. His eyes were boring into Roger's as he spoke.
"He'd been abused so bad before he came here. He was a bad influence on the other boys. We had to get rid of him."
"Right, asshole," Roger said, "but you weren't supposed—"
"Ben and I sent him to live with Billy," Terrance said quickly. He wasn't addressing me. He was explaining himself to Roger Vasquez. "Billy said he could handle him."
"You fucking idiots," Roger whispered.
"We couldn't do it, Roger!" Terrance cried. "We couldn't kill him just because you fucked him!"
Roger lunged at the pistol. Then the pistol went off.
I heard Caroline screaming my name. I called out to her to show I was alive.
Roger Vasquez lay on his back across the Oriental rug. The bullet had torn through his right shoulder, and his lips were trying to form words. Terrance stood over him, panting.
A strange knocking echoed through the house. I twisted in my seat. The sound was coming from across the courtyard. A small shadow blocked out the television's blue flicker. It was a young boy, slapping his hand against the glass. I couldn't tell which one he was. He had obviously been terrified by the gunshot and wanted to know what was going on.
Roger Vasquez took rasping breaths through clenched teeth. By sleeping with Everett, he had set into motion the chain of events that had brought me to their compound and led to the bleeding wound now darkening the carpet. If Corey had not seen Everett come off his uncle's yacht, had not recognized the young man as one of the boys he had abducted, I would never have met the two men in front of me.
Terrance Davidson regained his composure and stepped toward Roger's prone body. "You're a liar, Roger," he whispered. "You're a liar and a hypocrite. Just like Joseph. You said we could break the cycle."
Terrance shot Roger through the forehead.
"Terrance?" The young man didn't respond to the sound of my voice. He backed away from Roger Vasquez's body. His grip on the pistol remained tight, but his eyes were stunned with shock. Terrance Davidson made for a more unpredictable captor than Roger Vasquez and I wasn't relieved that he was now in charge.
There was still one question I needed an answer to. I had left LA to discover the identity of Corey's killer.
"Terrance!" This time it was Caroline who called out to the man. "Terrance, let's assess the situation here, all right?" Terrance turned to face the phone on the mantel as if it were a human being. "You want to be reunited with your friend Ben here?" Caroline asked him.
"Yes," Terrance said in a trembling voice.
"Okay, then," she responded. "Let's talk. There's one of you now, Terrance. I'm sorry. But that's not our fault. Now let's—"
A shrill series of beeps filled the room. Terrance twisted around. The sound was coming from Roger's supply belt, from the large pager I had noticed earlier. The sequence and the volume reminded me of a sound I had heard a night earlier: Caroline's perimeter alarm.
"You bitch!" Terrance roared. "You lying bitch! You knew where we were this whole time!" I heard Caroline's voice protesting, but Terrance’s shouting drowned out her words. "He told you, didn't he? Ben gave you our location! You fucking tortured it out of him!"
I knew it couldn't be true. If Ben had given Caroline our location, she would have been here by now.
I felt the truth moving in from the edges of my vision. I felt four years' worth of strange meetings, secret deals, and abductions coalesce into a single act that explained the past week of my life in a way that nothing else I had learned ever could.
As Terrance screamed invectives at Caroline and waved the pistol, I fought to keep my breathing even and my mind clear, pulling facts from the timeline in my head and placing them side by side. Four years earlier, Joseph Spinotta had asked Corey to set him up with a man named Reynaldo Reyez. Corey had tried to locate Reynaldo only to discover that he was dead. Corey had impersonated Reynaldo and abducted young boys for Joseph Spinotta.
And now Joseph Spinotta was dead.
"Terrance, listen to me!" I called out in a firm voice that got the man's attention.
The perimeter alarm on Rogers belt went silent for a few seconds. Then it started again. I ignored it.
"Who abducted the boys, Terrance?" I shouted over the beeping.
He looked from the speakerphone to me, torn, totally lost.
"Answer me and you'll find out who just broke through your fence!" I screamed.
"Reynaldo Reyez!" Terrance gasped.
"Have you ever laid eyes on Reynaldo Reyez?"
"No!" he gasped, leveling the gun on me. "Reynaldo still thinks Spinotta is in charge. We let him. Spinotta hired him."
"Did Joseph ever tell you how he met Reynaldo Reyez?" I asked.
Terrance just stared at me.
"Answer him!" Caroline shouted.
"No!" Terrance cried.
I heard Caroline mutter something in shock. She had already figured out where I was headed.
"A week ago," I said, struggling to control my voice, "Billy Hatfill called you and told you to kill a man named Corey Howard."
"Yes," Terrance said instantly. "He said Corey was trying to blackmail him."
"Did the name Corey Howard mean anything to you?" I asked.
"No!" he spat.
He was telling the truth. Joseph Spinotta never told his three companions who had hooked him up with an assassin named Reynaldo Reyez. Maybe he had kept this secret on purpose, in the hope that it would someday bring down the young men who had taken him prisoner.
"Who killed Corey Howard?" I asked.
Terrance d
idn't answer. He could tell that Caroline and I were already a hundred steps ahead of him, and that seemed to terrify him more than the shrill summons of the perimeter alarm.
"Who killed Corey Howard?" I asked.
I saw Scott Koffler's naked body, wrapped in a towel, murdered before he could tell me what Corey had hired him to do. I heard James Wilton telling me that Corey was the only one with the motive to kill the man, even as I had insisted that Billy Hatfill had done the job. I heard another perimeter alarm, the one on Caroline's property that had gone off the night before, suggesting that we were being followed. I saw a golden chain with a scorpion on the end, tossed at my feet, solid evidence that the man I had known as Corey Howard was dead. If it hadn't been removed from his neck by his killer, then who could have possibly handed it over to the Vanished Three?
"Answer the question, Terrance!" I said. "Who killed Corey Howard?"
"Reynaldo Reyez."
For a long while, the three of us listened to the perimeter alarm. Then Caroline spoke up. "You fucking idiots," she said. "You called Corey and asked him to kill himself."
Chapter 23
Terrance Davidson ripped the phone off the mantelpiece and sent it flying across the room. Then he thrust the gun under my jaw and undid the wooden cuffs around my wrists. He forced me to my feet, turned me around, and jammed the gun into my lower back.
"What the fuck was she talking about?" Terrance screamed in my ear.
"You heard her."
He forced me through the front door of the villa and out onto the porch. The vineyard below us was silent and empty. A vague light came from the barn beyond it. Inside the villa, the perimeter alarm was still howling.
"Where's Caden McCormick?" I asked.
"Why?"
"Because that's who he wants," I said.
I lifted one foot off the edge of the porch and rested it lightly on the top step. I listened to Terrance's ragged breathing. Then I kicked myself backward and felt the barrel of the pistol slide up my spine. Terrance lost his footing, and the two of us stumbled backward through the front door.
We hit the concrete floor and I rolled off him, scrambling to my feet just as he raised the gun at me. I flew out the front door as a gunshot tore through the frame above my head. I hit the bottom of the steps and started running for the cover of the Monterey pines along the side of the house. Corey was on the property and Terrance had just given away his location by firing a shot at me. My only instinct was to get as far away from Terrance as possible.
I saw the squat, rounded building hidden in the trees that I had noticed earlier and ran for it, expecting to find a locked door. But it was open, and I stepped inside and locked it behind me.
Inside was a long wooden table with a flat-screen computer monitor on it and a row of blinking CPUs underneath. There was an open can of Diet Coke next to the keyboard along with a set of keys. I pocketed the keys. Terrance Davidson must have been sitting at this desk when he received the phone call from Caroline Hughes. He had dashed out in a panic. On the computer monitor's screen, I saw an Excel file. It was a customer list. Five of the customers' names were in red, including that of Cameron Davis.
On the wall overhead was a bank of video monitors, three of them showing silent images of the property's distant perimeter fence. Beyond the fence were low, rolling hills dotted by sparse stands of oak trees. The three monitors below them gave interior views of the villa. Another monitor showed a garage buried in the oak trees that ran alongside the vineyard. The Suburban was parked outside.
Terrance Davidson appeared on one monitor at a heavy wooden door somewhere inside the villa. He punched numbers on a keypad in the wall next to the door. I figured he was trying to get to the boys. But I could see the boys' living quarters; a camera was angled down the length of a hallway that had dormitory-style rooms. The doors were open, giving me glimpses of rumpled twin beds. In a central living area, the big screen television flickered. No one was watching it. The boys were gone. They had either been set free or Corey had them in custody. Considering that they were evidence of his crimes, I didn't want to think about what he might to do to them.
A series of soft beeps came from the wall next to me. I saw a keypad just like the one Terrance Davidson was using inside the villa. Next to the keypad was the almost invisible outline of a door in the black-painted wall.
The lock clicked. Whatever code Terrance had entered into the keypad had unlocked the door right next to me. I drew it open slowly and saw a tiny cell with dark-blue walls and a twin bed with white plush bedding. A flat-screen television was broadcasting a succession of pristine landscape photographs designed to soothe the prisoner.
Caden McCormick sat on the floor, his knees against his chest. His head had been shaved, and his cheeks were sunken. He had been in this new home for almost four weeks. Obviously, he had not been ready to play with others. A plate of food lay overturned on the floor in front of him.
"Caden?"
His gaunt, glazed eyes stared at my legs. "I need to see my mom," he said quietly and determinedly.
"We need to go, Caden."
"I need to see my mom," he repeated. "She knows about the demon! She wants me to be safe!"
Whatever life had been offered in this place, Caden McCormick had fought it. Maybe that would have changed over time.
"I'll take you to see your mom," I said. "Just come with me, okay?"
He brought his deadened eyes to mine. "Are you lying?"
I turned and looked behind me through the doorway. On one of the interior monitors, I saw Terrance Davidson lying facedown in front of the door he had been trying to open moments earlier. Corey had entered the house and killed him, just like the eight meth addicts whose sons he had taken. Just like his own mother. Now Corey knew that his brother was not among the other boys.
"The demon's back, Caden," I said. "We need to go before he finds us."
The boy tensed, assessing my face with what seemed like desperate calculation. Then he mustered some reserve of courage that I would have never expected to find in a thirteen-year-old and got to his feet, his chin held high. I took his hand. Corey was nowhere to be seen on the video monitors. I studied the image of the Suburban and the garage and mapped our course.
The boy's legs gave way as we started to move. He was skin and bones. I squatted and told him to get onto my back. He climbed on. When his hands met in front of my chest, I got to my feet, opened the door, and ran.
I ran through the Monterey pines, down the hill, and into the oaks that ran alongside the vineyard. The oak branches were low, and I felt Caden tuck his face to my left shoulder as we went. We reached the barn. On the other side of it, I could see the garage and the Suburban in the distance. Getting there meant a long run through open space.
I didn't stop to doubt myself. Caden let out a small wail when he realized we were out in the open. I kept running. The barn shielded us from the villa for a few seconds, and then we were out in the open again. I was running so fast that I slammed into the side of the Suburban. Caden dropped from my back and fell to the dirt on his side. In one motion, I opened the driver's-side door. Caden crawled over the gearshift and into the passenger seat. I stabbed Terrance's key into the ignition, started the engine, and slammed on the gas, ripping the steering wheel to one side so I could accelerate and avoid hitting the garage at the same time.
We rocketed forward and plummeted down a long grassy hill. The trees broke and I saw an expanse of hills before us offering no sign of civilization. I glanced at Caden and told him to put his seat belt on. Instead of obeying, he pulled an oily black pistol out of the armrest by the handle.
"Put your seat belt on!" I shouted.
He had seen stronger anger than mine. Without so much as blinking, he turned forward, buckled his seat belt, and held the barrel of the gun in both hands. I swerved to avoid a gnarled oak tree and felt the impact of a large rock against the front tires. The land bucked underneath us like ocean waves.
Final
ly the perimeter fence rose in front of us, yards of moonlit chain link topped by coils of razor wire. Beyond it, more grassy hills like the ones we had just traveled. No dirt road. No highway. No lights in the distance. I had to drive right through the fence and keep going.
Then I saw the headlights behind us, cresting the hills we had traveled, disappearing from view only to reemerge again. At the top of a hill, when the front tire of the Suburban exploded, I assumed we had been shot at. Then the entire carriage jerked and screamed beneath us. In the rearview mirror, I saw a dark shape fly backward away from the car. The tire. The Suburban had been sabotaged before we set foot in it.
The entire nose of the carriage dropped. I slammed on the brakes too late. Speed and gravity formed a deadly union. My stomach rose into my throat. I realized we had left the ground. I heard Caden scream, saw the rocky slope slide beneath us across the windshield.
I tasted something coppery. I felt fingers stroking my face and a powerful arm encircling my lower back. I felt my shoulders scraping against the mangled frame of the Suburban's driver's-side window; then I was lifted into open air. When I opened my eyes, the man I had known as Corey Howard didn't smile. He lowered me to the earth and set my back against the side of the black Lincoln Navigator he had pursued us in. Several yards away, the Suburban lay on its roof, the weight of its carriage resting forward on its crushed nose. The driver's-side headlight shot a mangled beam across the wind-rippled grass.
Corey held my face in both hands to make sure I could keep my head steady. He was clean-shaven, his long dark eyes unblinking, and there was nothing in them to suggest that he had almost driven me to my death.
"They told you to kill yourself," I said.
"Yes."
"You pretended to be Reynaldo Reyez," I said. "You abducted those boys. You killed those people."
"I saved them. You know that," he said. "That's what Joseph Spinotta said he wanted to do."
"It was Everett, wasn't it?" I asked him. "You saw Everett come off of your uncle's yacht, and you thought that's what your brother was going to turn into. So you tried to get your brother back."
He nodded emphatically. Too emphatically. I realized I was giving him his story, taking the burden off him. He had been alive the entire time. He had known what Billy Hatfill was going to do to me and he had done nothing to stop it.
Light Before Day Page 36
