Brook had told the lead detective she didn’t buy their theory. Her mom and dad weren’t the perfect couple. She’d heard them argue enough times before, especially when she’d been growing up. Mom could be pretty fiery at times, and in a moment of confidence she’d once told Brook that, in their younger days, Dad had had more than one affair and she’d actually come close to leaving him. But in later years they’d seemed much happier. And that was another thing that had bugged Brook. Her father was the least aggressive man she’d ever met. Even when he raised his voice, there was no threat to it. There was no way he was capable of the savagery they’d attributed to him.
‘You’d be surprised the kind of mild-mannered people who one day just flip,’ the detective told her, ‘and no one sees it coming, least of all the people close to them.’
‘Then why didn’t you conclude that straight away?’ she asked. ‘You would have saved me a month of misery.’
‘We needed to look at every angle. As you say, there was no history of domestic violence between them and,’ he lowered his voice here, ‘there were elements of the crime scene that looked too perfect. Almost as if they were staged.’
‘Then why aren’t you still looking for the killer?’
‘If I had my way, we still would be,’ he’d answered, ‘but we’ve got finite resources and the doubts aren’t strong enough to warrant keeping them on this. I’m sorry.’
Brook thanked him for his efforts, but as she got up to leave he said something that surprised her.
‘You’re going to be quite a wealthy woman now, aren’t you?’ he said, eyeing her closely. ‘Spend it wisely.’
She knew, the moment he said those words, that he still wasn’t entirely convinced of her innocence.
Brook sighed. ‘It’s no compensation for losing the only two people in the world you love – and who love you – unconditionally,’ she told him. Then she walked out of there.
But she’d been carrying that burden on her shoulders ever since. The loss of her parents so violently and suddenly was hard enough to bear, but to know that some people, including the lead detective, believed she might have had something to do with it was even worse. Because it had never allowed her to get full closure.
Brook was indeed the sole beneficiary in the will. Her mom came from money, so as a family they’d always been very comfortably off, and the estate her parents left behind was worth a little over five million dollars, after taxes. Not enough to make a person super-rich, or to retire on, but more than enough to change a life or, she supposed, to give someone a motive to kill. She’d invested the money wisely and spent some of it financing life-coaching courses and taking time out to write her first book.
At the same time, she would have traded it all in, just to have her parents back. Their loss had left her completely alone in the world. Until Paige had come along. And that was why, if Paige was alive, Brook was determined to do whatever it took to get her back, whatever the risk to herself.
Nothing prepares you for the abduction of your child, but Brook was already a very resilient woman, and she hadn’t been broken yet.
She walked up and down the beach for a long time, before heading into the silent majesty of the redwood forest, all the time thinking and planning. By the time she was back at the car it was late afternoon, the horizon was dotted with leaping kite-surfers – and she knew exactly what she was going to do.
20
It was gone 8 p.m. and turning to dusk when Brook got back to their home in the hills.
She drove past twice before going in, just to check that the police hadn’t got there before her and discovered Logan’s body in the garage. She now had ten missed calls and four messages from Angie, and she knew that if Angie didn’t hear from her soon, she’d probably conclude that something had happened to her and call the cops anyway, so she needed to move fast. She didn’t want to get into an argument with her, so she sent a text instead, saying she’d make a decision about going to the police by 10 p.m.
Two minutes later, while she was parking the car in the driveway, Angie called again.
With a sigh, and knowing it was too risky to put it off any longer, Brook took the call.
Angie was clearly furious. ‘What the hell’s going on, Brook?’ she demanded. ‘Every minute you delay reporting what happened to Logan to the police, the more guilty you look. I can hire private detectives to investigate who’s setting you up, if that’s what you want, but you need the police to help you find Paige.’
Brook didn’t think they’d be able to help at all – not if her abduction had anything to do with Tony Reyes – but she didn’t tell Angie any of that. ‘I’ll call you at ten o’clock. Then you phone the police and we can go in together. There are some things I need to do first.’
‘You’re not doing anything stupid, are you, Brook?’
‘No, I’m just getting my affairs in order, in case they decide to keep me in.’
‘Okay. But if I don’t hear from you by 10 p.m. sharp, then frankly I’m no longer willing to represent you. Do you understand? Your freedom might be on the line, but so is my professional reputation.’
‘I understand. I’ll be back to you by then. I promise.’ Brook got out of the car and flicked on the central locking, feeling bad for deceiving Angie, but not seeing much alternative.
The house no longer felt like home, and there was no way she could ever think about setting foot in the garage again. As she mounted the stairs to their marital bedroom, Brook wondered if whoever had been watching them still had cameras in the house, or whether they’d now been removed to make her story look even less plausible.
She figured the latter, and experienced a moment of weakness at the thought of the sheer scale of the resources ranged against her, but refused to succumb to it. She didn’t have time for the luxury of doubt. At the beginning of each chapter in You Can Be the Hero there was an inspirational quote from a major, well-known figure, and she was reminded of the one from Winston Churchill in Chapter Eight: ‘Danger gathers upon our path. We cannot afford – we have no right – to look back. We must look forward.’
She pulled a suitcase out from under the bed and hurriedly packed it with enough clothes and toiletries to last a week, then headed to the bathroom with a pair of scissors and, with a real twinge of regret, cut her shoulder-length, chocolate-brown hair into a rough pageboy style. She had had a bit of practice cutting friends’ hair when she was a student back in London, so the result didn’t look as bad as it might have done, but it wouldn’t be winning any style awards any time soon. She’d considered dyeing what remained a different colour, like platinum-blonde, but there wasn’t time. Instead, she carefully placed all the cut hair in a plastic bag to take with her, not wanting to leave any clues behind for the police, when they finally got there. She’d seen enough cop shows on the TV to know how they tracked people down.
Finally, she opened the bedroom safe and took out the six thousand dollars in cash that was in there, courtesy of those of her coaching clients who preferred to pay for her services anonymously, and shoved it in a money belt under her jacket. Then she took out the most important thing: the pistol. She checked it over now. It had ten rounds in the magazine and one in the breech, and she shoved it in the back of her jeans, along with a spare magazine, comforted by the feeling of security it gave her.
And then, as she was shutting the safe, she smelled it.
Smoke.
Frowning, she pulled open the bedroom window and leaned out.
That was when she saw two things simultaneously. The first was the line of thick and rapidly growing plumes of dark smoke rising from the garage, where Logan still lay dead in the trunk. The second was a hooded figure in black running away across the lawn towards the boundary wall.
It took Brook a couple of shocked seconds to take in what was going on before she realized that the figure running away was almost certainly one of Paige’s kidnappers.
Without even thinking about it, she yanked the pistol
from the back of her jeans, flicked off the safety – holding it two-handed in front of her, as she’d been taught on the range – and stared down the sights at the fleeing figure. He was moving fast and was partially obscured by the smoke and lack of light, and he’d soon be hidden by the rhododendron bushes lining the back wall. She was only going to get one chance to hit him.
Brook could feel the full psychological weight of shooting a fellow human being bearing down on her and, for a long moment, she stood there at the window, her finger tense on the trigger, hands quivering. But then she thought of Paige – tiny, beautiful, gap-toothed Paige, trapped somewhere without her – and she fired.
The shot missed. It was impossible to tell by how much, but it was close enough that the intruder flinched and momentarily changed direction, before crouching down to make himself as small a target as possible. Brook tracked him with the pistol and, just as he reached the rhododendron bushes, she fired again, twice in rapid succession. But he kept running, disappearing amongst them, out of sight and out of range.
She knew she couldn’t let him go. He was her best chance of finding Paige. Thrusting the gun back inside her jeans and ignoring the heat from the barrel, she sprinted down the stairs, hurriedly unlocked the back door and continued running along the lawn in the direction he’d gone. Brook was fit. She was usually in the gym five days at least, and for a five-foot-four woman of thirty-six she was a fast runner, reaching the rhododendron bushes less than thirty seconds after he had.
The back gate was locked, so Brook jumped up and scrambled over the top of it, landing on her feet and taking off through the trees and down the hill. In the near-darkness she couldn’t see the intruder but, as she ran, she could make out the shape of a car parked up on the deserted back road. She picked up speed, certain it belonged to the intruder. If she could cut him off, or just get the licence number …
And then suddenly there was movement to her side and the hooded figure lurched at her, out of nowhere. As Brook tried to slow and turn at the same time, she heard what sounded like the stiff crackle of electricity, followed immediately by an explosion of pain and shock, and then she was falling forward, the thick grass rising up to meet her.
She hit the ground hard. Shoulder first, then head. Her whole body felt as if it was on fire as it shivered and jerked. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t seem to focus them, and she was vaguely aware, amidst the intensity of the sensations, that she’d been Tasered.
As the shock began to subside, Brook’s anger and frustration came back. She couldn’t believe she’d had her chance and blown it. She tried to sit up, but couldn’t move. Her only view was of the long grass in which she was enveloped. A creature that looked suspiciously like a tick crept up one of the blades, barely a foot from her face as it picked up the scent of her blood. She tried to sit up again, this time managing to get halfway, before falling back onto her side away from the tick, then finally she succeeded on the third attempt.
For a few seconds she staggered around in a ragged circle, trying to get her body back to normal, aware that both the intruder and the car that had been parked at the bottom of the hill were no longer there. She felt drained and exhausted, as if she had the world’s worst hangover, and when she shook her head, it felt like it was going to drop off.
Brook remembered the fire then. She had a neighbour on one side as well as across the road, and although the houses were spaced pretty far apart, it wasn’t going to take long for someone to see the smoke, if they hadn’t heard the gunshots already.
She forced herself to half-jog, half-stagger back towards the house. When she got to the gate, it took her three attempts to climb over it, but adrenalin was driving her on now, as self-preservation kicked in.
As she came back onto the lawn, she saw huge gouts of flame rising up from the trashcans next to the garage, followed immediately by an explosion in one of them, causing more black smoke to rise dramatically towards the sky. The effects of the Taser finally began to wear off as she ran back into the house and up the stairs, grabbing the suitcase containing her stuff, as well as the bag containing her recently chopped hair. She looked round desperately for the shell casings she’d fired, found two, couldn’t find the third, then ran back down the stairs and out the front door, throwing everything into her car just as she heard the first wail of sirens coming from down in the valley.
Whoever had lit the fire by the garage knew that Logan’s body was inside it, and that when the police and fire departments turned up, someone was going to find it.
And that was what was really worrying Brook because, as far as she was aware, only two people knew that Logan’s body was in there.
One was her. And the other was Angie Southby.
21
It was 9.30 p.m. and Detective Tyrone Giant was watching an old rerun of Seinfeld at home in his cramped one-bed apartment when he took a call from Detective Joe Padilla, telling him that they had a man’s body at a residential address over near Carmel, and there were definitely suspicious circumstances.
It was when Padilla told him the names of the people who lived there that he realized things were about to unravel for him very fast indeed. It was up to Giant, as the most senior detective in the department, to secure the scene. He took the address and told Padilla he’d meet him down there, before calling Jenna.
She was waiting for him on the street when he arrived at her place, dressed casually in jeans and sneakers, and he felt that twinge of attraction he always felt when he saw her. Jenna wasn’t classically pretty. She was a big-boned woman with a prominent jaw, and the way she wore her dark hair back in a tight ponytail didn’t really suit her, but none of that mattered. Giant liked her confidence; the fact that she had no airs and graces; and the way her big brown eyes twinkled when she smiled. He was also a little in awe of the fact that she’d twice been decorated for bravery, which was twice more than he had.
He never told her any of this, though. They got on well as partners and he didn’t want to spoil that. But when she got in the car and he smelled the lime-scented body lotion she often wore, he had to turn away temporarily and take a breath. Giant hadn’t had these kinds of feelings for a woman since he’d been with his fiancée – a relationship that had ended several years ago now – and he didn’t much like how vulnerable they made him feel.
‘So what have we got?’ asked Jenna, rearranging the shoulder holster underneath her jacket as they pulled away.
Giant cleared his throat. ‘A dead body at Logan Harris’s place.’ He’d told Jenna in confidence that Harris had been having an affair with Tony Reyes’s wife, as soon as he’d found out about it, wanting to get her input on what she thought they could do with the information. Tony Reyes might have been living the life of a respectable local businessman, but there wasn’t a person in the Monterey Police Department who didn’t know about his reputation as a killer of whole families, and who didn’t want to see him brought down. Jenna had told him that they couldn’t do much with the information, because there was no way they’d be able to get a warrant to bug either Logan Harris or Mrs Reyes, as they weren’t actually suspected of doing anything wrong – which had been when Giant had decided to go it alone and blackmail Harris with the photos, without telling anyone else what he was doing.
Jenna looked at him. ‘Do we know whose body it is?’
‘Not yet,’ said Giant, ‘but I’m guessing it’s Logan, seeing as he’s the one sleeping with a gangster’s wife.’
His prediction proved correct. Half an hour later, after a fast drive down the coast on Highway One, he was holding a handkerchief dipped in Vicks to his nose while looking down at Harris’s dead body, squashed into the trunk of his silver Toyota 4Runner.
Logan Harris was dressed for the outdoors in an unzipped tan leather jacket, check shirt above a white T-shirt, jeans and Caterpillar boots. The shirt was drenched in blood and a kitchen knife was buried almost to the hilt in his side at an upward angle, a wound that would almost certainly have pier
ced his heart, given the relative lack of blood. The jacket itself was undamaged, suggesting that someone had got very close to him to deliver the blows. When he pulled back the jacket with a gloved hand, Giant counted three stab wounds altogether, in a tight cluster.
Giant knew he couldn’t let on that he recognized Logan Harris, so he leaned over and gently patted down his corpse, careful not to contaminate the scene, before removing his wallet. He opened the wallet and read his name on the driving licence, trying to ignore the smiling man in the photo staring back at him.
‘This is one of the homeowners, Logan Harris,’ said Giant to the man standing next him, the county pathologist Dr Gary Wallace, a tall, cheery soul in his fifties, who’d grown up in the same neighbourhood as Giant in Oakland. Wallace had a big smile and a real zest for life, which was ironic considering that he had more experience of dead bodies than virtually anyone else in a fifty-mile radius. ‘Can you tell me how long he’s been dead for?’
‘He’s definitely not fresh,’ answered Wallace. ‘The body temperature’s already the same as the air temperature in here, but he’s still in the early stages of decomposition. At a guess, I’d say he died somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four hours ago.’
Giant looked down at the body in silence for a long minute, reeling through the possibilities in his head. He was blessed with a very good memory. If he saw something once, he remembered it – even weeks later – and consequently he didn’t tend to make many notes. Finally, when he’d seen all he needed for now, he went outside to escape the smell. He might have been used to seeing (and indeed smelling) dead bodies, but there was something far too personal about this one, and he didn’t want to be reminded of his potential part in Logan Harris’s death.
The scene had been fully secured now. Patrol cars lined the street outside and more were in the driveway, alongside a fire engine and an ambulance to remove the body. There’d been a total of three 911 calls reporting a fire on the premises, and one of the callers had claimed that she’d heard a number of gunshots at the same time. Two patrol cars had arrived with the fire truck and had checked that the area was safe, before allowing the firefighters to put out the fire, which had broken out next to the garage. During a routine search of the area afterwards the cops had picked up the smell from inside the garage, forced their way in and found the body. Giant now had a dozen local officers making house-to-house enquiries and taking statements, while they waited for the Forensics team to give the house – a big, French-style villa that probably cost what it would take Giant several lifetimes to earn – a full search.
We Can See You Page 11
