“It seems like you’re always out and about when there’s trouble.”
“No more than you, Dan. What kind of trouble are we talking about?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Must be something big, to bring out the chief of police at this hour.”
“We received an anonymous shots-fired call from the Coach House. And you just happen to be in the vicinity.”
“It’s a small town. I’m in the vicinity of pretty much everything.”
“I just think it’s interesting. The coincidence, you know.”
“You think I fired the shot, Dan? Is that it?”
“It’s not the gunshot that got me out of bed. It’s what’s inside the motel room.”
“Dead body?”
“The officers at the scene report a bathtub rigged with wires. Like something was hooked up to the wires. A car battery, maybe. Any idea what that’s about?”
“Either the world’s worst high school science experiment or a torture setup.”
“It’s summer. High school’s not in session.”
“So, torture.”
“That’s what we’re thinking.” The rain fell harder. “And that’s why I was headed over there. We don’t get too many torture cases in Brighton Cove.”
“Maybe that should be our slogan.”
“They tell me whoever was in the room cleared out in a hurry.”
She wondered how far she could press him for info. “Any ID on the guest?”
“Some foreigner. That’s all the manager remembers. Latin American, he says.”
“That covers a lot of ground.” Alan’s friend must have kept his mouth shut about a local attorney’s interest in that particular guest. “Any way to narrow it down? Credit card, license plate, vehicle description?”
“I’m told the guy paid cash. Manager didn’t see the car. And the Coach House isn’t the kind of place where you sign the register.”
“Guess not.”
He leaned in through the window, squinting at her. “When was the last time you were in the Coach House?”
She blew smoke in his face. “I don’t frequent dives like that.”
“So you’re saying we won’t find your prints in there?”
This was a bluff. Any motel room would have thousands of prints, too many to process. “I haven’t been inside, so how could I leave prints?”
“Yeah. How could you?”
He was staring at her from inches away. In the close confines of the car, she was reminded of Pascal’s penetrating gaze. A tremor threatened to zigzag through her body.
“You okay, Parker?”
Apparently she hadn’t suppressed the tremor well enough. “Torture kind of freaks me out. Good thing I wasn’t around during the Spanish Inquisition.”
“If you had been, you’d’ve found a way to beat the system. Unless you came up against me.”
“Wanna put me on the rack, Dan?”
“It would be one way to get answers. I know you’re involved somehow. Like before, I’m smelling your stink all over this thing.”
“I’m smelling your stink, too, buddy boy. Maybe you didn’t clean out your car as good as you thought.”
He squinted harder. “You think you’re smart, smarter than me.”
“That’s not setting the bar very high.”
“But it’s the smart ones who always trip up.”
“Sounds like somebody’s been watching Columbo.”
He stared off into the night, then turned his head to face her. “Tom and Rebecca,” he said.
She was sure she hadn’t heard him correctly. “What?”
“They were your parents, right? Tom and Rebecca Parker.”
“You’re into genealogy now?”
“They were crooks. They got murdered in a motel. Probably not much different from the Coach House.”
“You sure you haven’t been sampling the illegal substances in the evidence room?”
“Are you saying Tom and Rebecca weren’t your folks?”
“I’m saying it’s none of your damn business who’s in my family tree.”
“Everything about you is my business. I’ve made it my business. You’re a bad seed.”
She thought about giving him the finger, but her right hand was occupied with the cigarette, and her left had to stay out of view. “Look, am I getting a ticket or what?”
“No ticket. I just stopped for a chat.”
“Great. Nice talking to you. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a Burrito Grande with my name on it.”
“Got my eye on you, Parker. I’m watching. Always watching.”
“With all the great stuff on TV, I’m surprised you can find the time.”
He started to walk off. She peeled off the tape on her left wrist, then thought of something. She stuck her head out the window into the rain.
“Hey, Dan? What got lifted from the sporting goods shop?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I might have a lead on some hot merchandise.”
“Well, unless it’s a PSE Mach-twelve, you’re on the wrong track. That’s a—”
“I know what it is.”
“Is that your hot merch?”
“Nope. Guess I’m wasting your time.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
And fuck you, too, she thought.
She drove off, maintaining the posted speed limit until she turned onto Branch and was out of his sight. Then she floored the gas pedal, accelerating down the two-lane rural road at sixty, hoping she didn’t hit a damn deer.
She’d lucked out, anyway. If Dan had noticed the carbine in the rear or the tape on her wrist, she would be cooling her heels in the station house. She could have talked her way out of it eventually, but by then it would have been too late to save Alan Kirby and his family.
She only hoped it wasn’t too late now.
CHAPTER 20
The Kirbys lived in an old farmhouse on a half acre, with a rickety fence marking off their property’s perimeter, and piney woods on three sides. An isolated location, well away from the neighbors. Bonnie didn’t like it. It meant Pascal could break in and take care of business with little risk of attracting attention. For all she knew, he might be inside already.
Right now the house was dark, with only the porch lights aglow. She pulled off the road into a wooded grove across the way and parked the Jeep out of sight, hoping the rain wouldn’t come down too hard and leave her tires stuck in a slop of mud. She left her hat in the car, not wanting to lose it like her last one, but she took everything else—the fanny pack with the Glock, and the Ruger carbine, which she strapped to her shoulder. She packed her pants pockets with extra twenty-five-round banana clips for the Ruger, and slipped the tool kit from her glove box into one of the poncho’s two front pockets.
Some houses in Millstone County dated back to the Revolutionary War, and the Kirby place was probably one of them. It was a three-story whitewashed pile with a rickety front porch and two tiers of dark windows. The top floor was a windowless loft or attic. Despite the rain, a couple of heavy-duty AC compressors hummed at the rear of the house. The summer night this far inland was humid and stifling, and the steady downpour had done nothing to lower the temperature.
She circled the house, examining every ground-floor entrance for signs of forced entry. She saw no tamper marks on the door locks and window latches, no footprints on the window sills to disturb the settled dust, and no footprints that preceded hers.
Unless her adversary had chosen to enter via an upstairs window—improbable—he wasn’t here yet. But he could arrive at any time.
On her second circuit of the house’s perimeter, she noticed a small item mounted on a three-foot pole about twenty feet from the driveway. She approached it from behind and carefully inspected the device. It was the sensor-transmitter of a driveway alert system. It sent a pulsed infrared beam across the driveway to a reflector aligned directly oppo
site. If a car interrupted the beam, a warning would chime inside the house. A solar panel on top allowed it to store power throughout the day.
She disabled the unit and unscrewed it from its mounting, then stuffed it and the reflector into the other front pocket of her poncho. She had a use for both items. But first she had to get into the house.
On most of the windows, her keychain flashlight—yeah, it still worked, despite immersion in the tub—had revealed wire sensors that would trigger an alarm if the window was raised or broken. Well, Alan had told her he had a security system. But a couple of windows at the rear were unprotected. She chose one that looked in on a utility room.
With a glass cutter, she carved along the edges of a window pane, removing it from the sash, then reached in and opened the latch. After that, it was easy to raise the window and climb through. She kicked wet dirt off her shoes and scattered it on the sill to conceal any scuff marks left by her entry, shut the window, and pressed the pane back in place. She didn’t want Pascal to know she’d beaten him there.
The only way to get from the utility room to the rest of the house was through a hall doorway. She figured there would be a pressure-sensitive mat under the carpet at that spot. It was a cost-cutting measure. A mat at the bottleneck was cheaper than sensors on two windows.
Kneeling, she peeled up part of the carpet and confirmed her guess. She stepped around the mat to avoid triggering it.
Quickly she explored the downstairs. Dining room, kitchen, half bath, den. In a living room cozy enough to be called a parlor, she found the battery-operated receiver for the driveway alert system. She concealed the sensor-transmitter under a table in the parlor at the foot of the stairs, taping the reflector to the wall directly opposite. When the unit was switched on, it sent a continuous invisible beam across the stairway.
She was careful not to break the beam and trip the alarm as she headed up the stairs to the second floor, where the staircase took a dogleg behind a wall and continued to the loft. Rain drummed on the roof. In the stillness of the sleeping house, she looked in on the bedrooms. One of them was a child’s room, with a small sleeping shape under a mound of bedcovers. Nearby was the master bedroom—two shapes.
She saw no need to wake the Kirbys. Better to keep the house silent so she could listen for any sound of intrusion.
Down the hall from the master bedroom was an office. In it was a file cabinet. Her penlight played over tabbed folders marked Finances, Taxes, Real Estate, Insurance. Most of the folders were thin, which was no surprise, since the Kirbys’ history didn’t extend very far.
She wanted to take a better look at some of those folders, especially the unmarked ones at the back of the cabinet, but not now. Her spider sense was tingling. She had the unsettling feeling that her bathroom buddy was about to make his move.
She returned to the stairs and set down the receiver on the second flight, dialing the volume low. She could wait there, screened from view by the wall, with the chime to alert her when Pascal started up the staircase.
She removed the poncho and took up her position on the stairway to the loft, the Glock in her hands, the Osprey silencer screwed on tight. With the windows shut and the neighbors far away, she wasn’t worried about the sound of gunfire, but the silencer would minimize her muzzle flashes and give Pascal less of a target in the dark.
Not that she intended to give him time to aim and shoot. When the chime sounded, she couldn’t hesitate. It was all about speed. Shoot first and ask questions never.
She had no problem with that. After what he’d done to her, pulling the trigger on that fucker would be a pure pleasure.
Was she scared? Nah, not really. On edge. But not scared. Fear was for those times when you were helpless, and she wasn’t helpless now, not with two guns and plenty of spare ammo and a workable plan of action.
In the tub she’d been helpless—and plenty scared. She really had thought it was over for her. Somehow her life had come full circle, and she was in another bathtub in another cheap motel, only this time she wasn’t hiding ...
She shook her head. Bad memory. Bad enough that she hadn’t owned up about it to Des. She’d told him she ran off on her own, and her parents were killed. Both things had happened—but not in that order.
The motel in Conover, Pennsylvania, could have been a motel anywhere. Always there were the same faded bath towels, the same balky TV set that got only some of the channels, the same hairs of unknown origin in the shower drain, the same noisy neighbors who could be heard through the walls, laughing or fighting or screwing. There was the bed where her parents slept, and the cot—if the motel supplied one—where Bonnie slept. When there was no cot, she slept on the sofa; when there was no sofa, she slept on the floor. In this particular motel, there was a sofa, at least.
They hadn’t been at the motel long, not even long enough for Bonnie to find a local school where she could play the role of outcast. And that night it became clear they would be moving on soon, probably the next morning.
Bonnie was only fourteen, but she knew the signs. Her dad was acting worried, the way he always did before they hit the road. He was talking about things going south, about a deal that hadn’t worked out as planned.
Her mom nodded and mumbled noises signifying concern, sympathy, agreement—noises that could have signified anything, actually.
Neither of them paid any attention to their daughter. They never did. Her father seldom addressed her directly, and when he spoke of her, he didn’t use her name. She was “the girl.” “Tell the girl to stop moping around ... Let the girl do it ... Don’t talk about that in front of the girl ...”
Two things saved Bonnie that night. The first was that her mom had done the laundry in the afternoon, using some coin-operated machines at the rear of the motel, and she hadn’t laid Bonnie’s freshly washed blankets on the sofa yet. Without the blankets, no one could tell that a child would be sleeping there, or that a child was staying in the room at all.
The second was that she was in the bathroom with the door half closed. Not open, so anyone in the main room could see her, and not closed entirely, signaling that someone was inside. Half closed—just enough to conceal her, but not enough to draw attention. Such a little thing, but it made the difference.
She was in her underwear—her parents had never sprung for pj’s—and she’d just finished brushing her teeth when there was a pounding on the motel room door, then harsh whispers and hurried footsteps. Visitors, three of them at least, crowding into the room. Her dad uttered some kind of protest, and she heard a smack, then a thud. Her mom started to cry out but fell silent. Too silent.
Bonnie knew something bad was going down. Her dad had been on the run for years, running from everybody, and this time it appeared he had not run fast enough.
The bathroom was small and not very clean, but it did have a nice big bathtub with a vinyl shower curtain. The curtain was yellow and printed with images of baby ducks. Bonnie climbed into the tub and hid behind the curtain, smelling shampoo, seeing the mildew in the grout between the shower tiles, and listening to the sounds of torture from the next room. Fierce whispers, groans of denial, cries of pain or protest immediately stifled. The mirror over the sink offered a partial view, and by craning her neck Bonnie could see her father in the room’s one straight-back chair, his hands bloody. Her mother lay on her stomach on the bed, one arm jerking feebly as she made low whimpering noises.
From the questions it was obvious that some money had gone missing and the men thought her father had taken it. He denied he had, and Bonnie believed him, but the men didn’t, or maybe they just didn’t care. He’s telling the truth, she thought furiously, just leave him alone, he’s telling the truth.
And then the strangers began to search the motel room.
That was the scariest part. The bathroom door opened fully and someone came in, a man, breathing hard, his footsteps heavy. She balled up behind the pleated curtain among the baby ducks, squeezing herself as small as
possible, knowing all he had to do was glance into the tub and he would see her huddled there, and then ... and then ...
She was a witness, and she knew what happened to witnesses.
But he didn’t look in the shower. He was interested in the medicine cabinet, the storage space under the sink, even the inside of the toilet tank. If he saw the toothbrush drying on the lip of the sink, he ignored it.
Then he swore luridly and stomped out of the bathroom, leaving her unseen and untouched.
The other searchers had no better luck. There was a brief, muttered exchange. She caught only a few words. One man said they didn’t need to do it, and another man said, No loose ends.
Just before they left, Bonnie heard two noises, muffled, like a distant door slamming twice. She knew what it was. She’d watched her dad practicing in the woods with a silenced gun.
She emerged from her hiding place and found her parents in the other room. Her dad was missing several fingers, and her mom’s skirt and undies had been pulled down, and there was blood on her thighs.
Both of them had been shot in the temple—clean shots, efficient and professional.
She understood what had happened. Her dad hadn’t taken the money. One of the others had stolen it and let him take the blame. Maybe it was the one who’d raped her mother, or the one who’d snipped off her father’s fingers one at a time.
A man who could do a thing like that, Bonnie often thought, was a man who deserved to die.
Outside, the rain fell harder, banging its fists on the farmhouse’s roof. She heard a distant roll of thunder. She hoped the storm didn’t wake one of the Kirbys. It would be awkward if wifey or kiddo were to wander out into the hall for a drink of water and come across her.
She wondered how much the wife really knew, and what the hell her client had gotten himself into. Most of all, she wondered what was taking Pascal so goddamned long.
By this time he had to know the location of the house. He could easily get in. It was his only logical move.
So what was he waiting for?
Beside her, the chime sounded.
He wasn’t waiting.
He was here.
She sprang to her feet, pivoting out from behind the wall to stand at the top of the staircase, ready to open fire.
But there was no target. No Pascal. The stairway was empty.
False alarm?
Cold Around the Heart Page 13
