Firefighters in heavy turnout coats and frantic hotel staff members were managing the evacuation, helping coughing, terrified guests and guiding everyone out the big, double glass doors into the parking lot. Many were in their pajamas, nightgowns, or robes, and some just had sheets or blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Mothers herded crying children and maids helped frail, bewildered seniors. Paramedics triaged the injured, tending to burns and administering oxygen.
“Paramedic!” Olivia called in what she intended to be a clear, strong voice, but came out was a strangled, croaking wheeze. “Help!”
An older black female with a man’s haircut and a flyweight boxer’s build responded immediately to her cry. She ran to Olivia’s side and began to methodically and efficiently check Kieran’s vitals.
“Heart attack, from a congenital heart defect.” Olivia said, the act of talking like broken glass in her smoke-scoured throat. “He’s been unresponsive for approximately eight to ten minutes. I started CPR but was unable to continue when the conditions in our location became unsafe.”
The gruff paramedic made a terse, non-verbal sound in acknowledgement, without turning her head or stopping her ministrations. A second paramedic, this one white and male with glasses and a shaved head, joined the first. Seconds later, the female paramedic looked up at her partner and shook her head.
“Wait,” Olivia said. “Wait, no...”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, her hard, dark eyes softening. “There’s nothing more we can do for him. He’s been gone for some time. Most likely died instantly.”
“No,” Olivia said, shoving the paramedic aside and putting her hand on Kieran’s cold, unmoving chest. “No, that’s not possible. Don’t you have a defibrillator?”
“Defib can’t bring back the dead,” the male paramedic said. “It ain’t a magic wand, kid.”
“No,” she said again. “You just need to...”
She stopped, and leaned into Kieran, starting up her desperate one-handed compressions again.
“Come on,” she hissed between clenched teeth. “Come on come on come on.”
“Honey, don’t,” the woman said, putting a gentle, calloused hand on Olivia’s shoulder.
The compressions had shifted to angry hammer-fists, slamming into Kieran’s bony sternum again and again as a tortured, rusty scream welled up inside her.
Echoing Olivia’s unleashed scream, a wall of raging flame surged through the lobby like the leading edge of a nuclear blast. The female paramedic grabbed Olivia and dropped to the charred carpet, using her own body to shield her from the flash fire.
Olivia’s last thought as she slipped into dizzy blackness was that she was the one who was supposed to be doing the protecting.
And she had failed.
58
When Lorna Gilbert arrived at the Co-Z Inn, it was total chaos. She’d been on her way to New York City to report in at the Massive Dynamic head office, when she’d gotten a call saying there had been a blip on the trace that had been put on Kieran’s credit card.
They’d done it as soon as she’d reported him AWOL from the school. But when the call had come across the police band, reporting an explosion at that location, she’d floored it all the way there.
Lorna had been working for Massive Dynamic for twelve years, keeping a watchful eye on high-functioning Cortexiphan positives under the guise of a teacher, guidance counselor, or dorm mother—whatever the situation required. Before that, she’d worked in private security, and could still stand and bang with the boys without breaking a sweat.
Although she referred to herself as “Mrs. Gilbert,” and often told her charges that she had children because it made her seem more motherly, in reality she’d never even married. When she was younger, she’d experimented a bit, thinking that her disinterest in men meant that she was into women. By the time she was forty, though, she realized that she just wasn’t interested in intimate relationships at all.
On the other hand, she got a lot of satisfaction from taking care of her young charges, and often developed strong bonds with them, despite the fact that the relationship was built upon false pretenses.
Just now, she was worried sick about Olivia.
Olivia was a strange one, she had to admit that. She was so reserved, so quiet, so mature. Not shy at all—just intensely private. A loner. It had taken a lot of work to put her at ease, to get her to let her guard down, even just a few precious inches. But once she did, Lorna discovered that she was ferociously smart and thoughtful and even funny in her own quirky, deadpan way.
She’d sent one of their best security teams after Olivia when she foolishly went after that rogue cop on her own, giving them strict orders to protect her at all cost. But somehow, a sixteen-year-old girl had managed to give MD’s finest the slip, a fact she would never let them live down.
Lorna just wished that she could have found a way to communicate with Olivia, to let her know that those men were there to help her, not hurt her.
Through some kind of miracle, Olivia had found a way to beat that cop and save her sister, although to be perfectly honest, Lorna didn’t understand exactly what had gone down inside that house. It didn’t matter. She’d learned early on that there were a lot of things she didn’t fully understand, and she was okay with that. All that had mattered was that Olivia was safe, and being cared for at a Massive Dynamic research facility.
Until now.
Lorna didn’t know if the two explosions that occurred that day were both caused by Olivia, but this second one had to have been, since she was the only Cortexiphan positive in the building.
The parking lot outside the Co-Z Inn was blocked off by emergency vehicles, so she had to park across the main road and run over on foot to the burning hotel.
Firefighters were battling the blaze while paramedics and the walking wounded helped evacuate those who couldn’t walk. Crowds of fearful, shivering guests milled about the parking lot, unsure of what to do or where to go.
She found Olivia sitting on the pavement with a silver thermal blanket around her shoulders and a black female paramedic dabbing at a cut on her forehead. Her face was smudged with soot and her body language was slumped and utterly defeated.
In her eyes, the thousand-yard stare.
“Olivia,” Lorna said, squatting down beside her. “Thank god you’re okay.” She looked around, then back at the girl. “Where’s Kieran?”
Olivia shook her head, her face mask-like and emotionless.
“You mean you don’t know where he is?” Lorna asked. “Or...”
“He’s dead,” she said flatly. Then she lifted her head. “He’s dead, okay?” she snapped. “He’s dead, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Oh, honey,” Lorna said, wrapping her arm around Olivia’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry. Was it his heart?”
Olivia turned away and nodded. Lorna looked to the paramedic.
“Is she okay,” she asked.
“Physically,” the woman said, and she nodded. “She’ll be okay. But mentally?” She shrugged and started packing up her equipment.
“Come on, Olivia,” Lorna said. “Come back to the school. Rachel misses you. She needs you.”
Olivia looked up at her, a slight frown creasing between her pale brows.
“Rachel,” Olivia said. “Jesus, what am I gonna tell her?”
“Tell her the truth. Tell her that you stopped at a motel on the way home from the hospital, because you were both so tired,” Lorna said. “And then Kieran had a heart attack. It’s not a lie, it’s just not the whole story.” She helped Olivia to her feet. “Sometimes, people are better off if they don’t know the whole story.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Olivia said, leaning heavily against her.
EPILOGUE ONE
SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK 2008
Junior Agent Olivia Dunham unholstered her sidearm and got out of the Crown Vic, nodding silently to her partner, Special Agent Dan Considine.
Considine was in his early fifties, lean and tough as beef jerky. What hair he had left was shaved down to silver stubble, and his eyes were an unusual shade of pale, grayish brown behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He had a humorless and taciturn disposition that made for dull company on long assignments, but he was also a patient and skilled teacher with years of knowledge and practical on-the-job experience that Olivia soaked up like a sponge.
She trusted him with her life.
Considine got out from behind the wheel and drew his own gun, aiming over the roof of the car to cover her as she moved cautiously toward the door of the cabin.
It was one of many small, seedy vacation rentals clustered around the outskirts of Sequoia National Park in central California. Built for free-range families back in the optimistic, post-World War II boom years, when a vacation didn’t have to be a 3-D, interactive, corporate-sponsored, consumer circus meticulously designed to inspire brand loyalty in jaded and entitled offspring, cabins like these were places to spend lazy summers catching fireflies and telling ghost stories.
Now, the fireflies had been driven to the brink of extinction by the undying electric glow of a jacked in modern existence, and no one could pay attention long enough to find out what happened at the end of the ghost story. As a result, rustic and quaint family cabins like these sat empty, season after season, inhabited only by the occasional tweaker misfit wearing a tin-foil hat, or bewildered foreign tourist who’d fallen for some kind of online bargain.
The owner of the property was named Lee Canliss, an older woman who could have been anywhere from sixty to a-hundred-and-six. She was tall, but deeply stooped and wore her white hair in two long braids like a little girl. Her clothes and boots were utilitarian and gender neutral, except for the quirky addition of a big glittery pendant in the shape of a stylized lion head.
She told Olivia that the occupant had given his name as Mark Mitchell, but that she recognized him from the drawing of the suspect in the Jensen case. She’d also said that the man calling himself Mitchell had a girl with him when he checked in—a blonde who “looked young.” She claimed the girl had been sitting in the passenger seat of the car the whole time, and mostly kept her face turned away, but that the hair looked kind of like the girl on TV, so she’d phoned the FBI tip line.
As soon as the call came in, Olivia came running.
This deeply personal vendetta had started out as a low-priority Jane Doe case involving two sets of unidentified female remains. The burnt skeletal fragments had been discovered in two different states more than four hundred miles apart, but they were both found to contain traces of the same brand of lighter fluid. Both had been burned elsewhere and then later dumped. Both were Caucasian females between fourteen and seventeen years of age.
Olivia wound up with the case partly because no one else wanted it. She tinkered with it in her spare time, but got nowhere until she got a blip from a small-town sheriff who had a complaint from an underage prostitute named Makayla Wayne. The girl claimed a john had tried to set her on fire, but she had escaped and provided a description of her attacker. The drawing based on her description was laughable, like an evil pirate in a kid’s cartoon, but one element of this mythical pirate stood out to Olivia.
He had a hook for a hand.
His right hand.
When she called up a mugshot that showed the victim, she felt sick to her stomach. Blond hair. Green eyes. That girl could have been her little sister.
Olivia had been overwhelmed by a flood of complex, dark, and bittersweet memories that she’d tried to leave buried in the past. Her life was good now, exactly what she wanted in every way. She had an exciting job that challenged her, and an active and carefree love life. Rachel was married and mother to a beautiful little girl of her own, and while Olivia couldn’t imagine settling down herself anytime soon, she enjoyed being an aunt to the precocious Ella.
There wasn’t a single thing Olivia wanted that she did not have.
But now this unquiet spirit from her difficult past had raised his ugly head, to remind her of things that were better off forgotten. She was angry at first, but as the pieces started to fall swiftly into place, she began to realize that this unexpected resurrection was actually a good thing. The right thing. Closure after all those years.
She paid a visit to Makayla Wayne, and it wasn’t the slam dunk she’d hoped for. The girl was cranked to the gills during the interview, and positively identified a control photo of Dan Considine as her attacker, before changing her mind and picking out the photo of Tony Orsini.
* * *
Unwilling to let it go, Olivia started slogging through female missing person reports in which the juvenile subjects were between the ages of fourteen and seventeen and had blond hair and green eyes. Once she had eliminated the ones who didn’t look anything like her, or lived more than a thousand miles away from the dump sites, she narrowed it down to a solid dozen possibilities.
She’d had to sweet talk a lab tech into slipping her request into the forensic queue, but it still took more than six months to get results. It was worth it, though, because she got a DNA match between one of the missing juveniles and one of her charbroiled Jane Does.
The match turned out to be a hard-partying high school dropout named Amanda Lindstrom, from Omaha, Nebraska. Olivia paid a visit to Omaha to talk to Amanda’s grief-stricken parents and friends. She got lucky when one of the girl’s friends told her about a one-armed man who had bought liquor for them, and “seemed weird.” She claimed that the local cops had ignored her story, because they had been convinced that Amanda’s African-American boyfriend was responsible for her disappearance.
She positively identified the photo of Tony Orsini as the “weird guy.”
Still circumstantial and mostly based on the testimony of unreliable witnesses, Olivia’s little pet case was starting to get warmer. What she really needed was some kind of solid evidence, like surveillance footage or a credit card receipt that placed Orsini in the area on the day Amanda went missing.
When she started digging into Orsini’s recent whereabouts, she discovered that he had fallen off the grid nearly nine years ago—when he had last been released from an inpatient psychiatric facility. No bank accounts, no credit cards, no utilities, nothing.
He had become a ghost.
So with little or nothing to go on, Olivia continued to work the case in her spare time, sifting through minutia and watching hours of gas station security camera footage until her eyes crossed.
Then Jamie Jensen went missing, and Olivia’s cold case flashed white hot.
Sixteen-year-old Jamie Jensen was an all-American girl next door. The only child of Sam and Nancy Jensen from Fort Worth, Texas, Jamie was popular and athletic, She played on the girls’ basketball team and volunteered at the local animal shelter. She wasn’t a hooker, a junkie or a runaway. She was a nice girl from a nice family.
A telegenic victim, who also happened to look remarkably like a young Olivia.
Nobody cared about what happened to a white-trash tweaker like Makayla Wayne or a bad girl like Amanda Lindstrom, but when Jamie Jensen failed to come home from the library, it sparked a multi-state manhunt and a media feeding frenzy. The drawing based on her brother’s description of a suspicious one-armed man he’d seen hanging around the library looked exactly like Tony Orsini.
Because Olivia had already done so much preliminary legwork on Tony, she and Considine had taken the lead in the Jensen investigation. It was her first major case.
And now, all that legwork was paying off. A second back-up car full of muscle and bullets was prowling down the long dirt driveway, kicking up a cloud of dust in the hot, still afternoon. There was a third team heading up toward the back of the cabin via the strip of woods that separated it from its neighbor, in case Orsini decided to make a run for it.
Olivia felt sharp and confident—everything was going exactly the way she had planned. She walked slowly through the long grass, gun drawn and ready. Considine w
as right behind her. A startled grasshopper leapt away from their invading feet as they approached the cabin door.
There was a warm, summery scent of crushed grass and sun-bleached wood in the air, but beneath it, Olivia could detect another sharper, more unnatural odor.
Kerosene.
An alarmed look passed between her and her partner. He nodded, grim and silent.
Olivia kicked the door in.
Inside, she found Tony Orsini and Jamie Jensen, both soaked in stinking kerosene. Jamie lay on her side on the splintery floor, roughly hogtied and gagged with a knotted bandana. When she saw Olivia, she tried to scream but the sound was reduced to a muffled squeak.
Tony spun to face her, an unlit Zippo lighter in his hand.
The years had not been kind to him. He looked shrunken and worn out. In Olivia’s memory, he’d been this towering monster, all-powerful and looming over Rachel like an evil dragon. Seeing him now, he just looked like a sad old man. His hand was shaking, his yellowy, bloodshot eyes wide with disbelief.
“Olivia?” he said, voice cracking and barely a whisper.
She held out her arm to keep Considine back, squinting against the fumes. One wrong move and Orsini would spark that lighter and engulf them all in flames.
“Yes, Tony,” she said, gun pointed down and her free hand up, palm out. “It’s me. What are you doing?”
“I...” He looked from the lighter in his hand to the bound girl on the kerosene-drenched floor. “I thought...” He looked back up at Olivia. “I thought you were dead.”
“I came back for you,” she said, holding out her hand. “Now give me the lighter, Tony. We don’t need it. Or her.”
He looked down at the lighter, and then very slowly held it out to her.
She snatched the lighter, tossed it away and immediately slammed him up against the wall, gun pressed against his neck as she slapped her cuffs around his left wrist. Then she paused, non-plussed. How was she supposed to handcuff that hook?
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