Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  “Heard the car.” He thrust out his hand. “Glen Kartauk.”

  “Wayne Sheppard, John Gutierrez. Thanks for seeing us, Mr. Kartauk.”

  “My pleasure. Please, come on in.”

  “You have air-conditioning,” Goot exclaimed as they walked up a tiled hail.

  “Only because the house has an in-ground generator that comes on within moments of lost power. Wonderful invention. The tank holds propane and if this power outage lasts much longer, I imagine the tank will be scraping empty and then it’s good-bye creature comforts. Let’s go into the kitchen, it’s cooler. Don’t know if you gentlemen have had breakfast yet, but my housekeeper made us some fresh coffee and pastries.”

  The table had been set. The pastries reminded Sheppard that he hadn’t eaten anything before he’d left Mira’s trailer, and the coffee smelled great. Once they were settled, Kartauk said, “If you hadn’t called me, Mr. Sheppard, I would’ve called you today. Yesterday morning, I was on a ladder, replacing screen on the back patio, and I had the TV on. Heard about the disappearance of Adam Nichols from the Mango Hill house. It shocked me, I lost my balance, fell off the ladder, and broke my damn leg. They wouldn’t release me until this morning.”

  “Shocked you because?” Goot asked.

  Kartauk’s bright blue eyes went to Goot. “Coincidence like that… Another boy disappears from the Mango Hill House, Mr. Gutierrez, the two crimes separated by nearly thirty years. Makes you wonder, right? Synchronicity.” He shook his head, slipped on a pair of Ben Franklin reading glasses, and slid a thick file across the table to Sheppard and Goot. “Here’s everything I collected on the abduction of Spenser Longwood. It covers the three years I pursued Ray Connor and everything I knew about the case. I lost his trail in Arizona.”

  “How do you know Ray Connor took Spenser?” Sheppard unzipped his laptop case, removed the file that contained all they’d found on the Longwoods, and set it on the table. An information exchange. “We didn’t find any definitive evidence about that.”

  Kartauk opened Sheppard’s file and stared at a photo of Joy Longwood. “This picture doesn’t do her justice.” He raised his eyes. “Look, this is a long and complicated story. Let’s start with Friday, May 16, 1975. Joy didn’t feel well that morning and called in sick to work. Spenser didn’t feel so great either, so Joy figured they’d caught the same bug. She let him stay home from school. I know this because she called me around seven that morning. We talked most mornings. I told her I’d stop by the house that afternoon to bring her chicken soup and groceries or anything else she needed. I should have just gone over there and taken care of her and Spenser.”

  “I didn’t realize you knew her.” Or knew her as well as it sounds like you did.

  “We were close. Had been for a long time. I was, uh, still married and was trying to get out of it gracefully.” He smiled ruefully. “Big mistake. I made a lot of mistakes in those days. The instant I met Joy, I was crazy about her. You’re lucky if you get a chance like that once in your life. But I was bogged down in obligations, responsibilities, wife, kids… .” He shook his head again. “Hell, I’m a Pisces and we feel guilty about everything.”

  Sheppard laughed. He liked this guy already. “So she called you at seven. And the fire trucks and paramedics arrived when?”

  “Around nine. At some point during those two hours, someone came into the house, there was a violent confrontation, and Joy was knocked out. The person set fire to one of the downstairs rooms and snatched Spenser. Like I said, that person was Ray Connor, who Joy had lived with up north. I pursued him for the next three years, following a few leads and my instincts. Then I lost track of him. By then, I’d resigned from the department, my marriage had collapsed, and I had run out of money. I was forced to give up my search.”

  “You mentioned leads,” Sheppard said. “What kind of leads?”

  “Eyewitnesses who saw Ray Connor with a young boy. I had photos that I took on the road with me.”

  “Fill us in on Ray Connor, Mr. Kartauk.”

  He removed the photo of Joy Longwood from Sheppard’s file and ran his fingers slowly—lovingly--over the surface. “They met when she was doing graduate work at Yale. Her room got broken into or something. I’m a bit vague on these details. Anyway, the New Haven cops were called. Ray showed up. He was a beat cop in New Haven in those days. They were lovers for a couple of months, but he was a big drinker and she broke it off. He didn’t like that. He started stalking her, making her life miserable. She got a restraining order and for a while, he left her alone. Then she found out she was pregnant and dropped out of Yale and moved back to Norwalk with her mother.

  “Ray pursued her, harassed her, threatened to hurt her mother if Joy didn’t give him a chance. She was seven months pregnant by then and worried that he would make good on the threat against her mother.”

  “Pregnant with twins,” Sheppard said.

  Kartauk’s brows lifted, pushing the wrinkles on his forehead into his hairline. “You’ve done your homework. I’m impressed. I thought cops and journalists had lost the art of homework.”

  “Not all of us,” Goot said.

  “Joy moved in with him. He supported her, waited on her hand and foot. He wanted to marry her so the twins would have ‘proper parents.’ She refused to marry him and in her eighth month, her mother had a fatal accident. She fell down her cellar stairs. Joy went into early labor, probably because of the emotional trauma.” He sipped from his mug, helped himself to one of the pastries. After a moment, he went on. “Fast forward a few months. Joy sold her mother’s house and opened a separate account with that money that Ray didn’t know about. She was terrified of him, especially when he’d been drinking.

  “Anyway, one night while Ray was working late, she packed the kids into her van and left him. He found her two days later in Delaware, beat her up, and told her she could leave, but he would keep the twins. She refused. They made it another few months. Then one of Ray’s cop buddies told him Joy had filed half-a-dozen charges against him. I guess ole Ray realized the shit was hitting the fan and decided it was time to cut his losses and run. So he took Lyle with him. Joy fled with Spenser and eventually ended up on Tango.

  “She bought the house on Mango Hill with money from the sale of her mother’s place. The high school was always on the lookout for qualified math teachers and she got the job within a couple of weeks of moving here.”

  “Any idea where Ray went with Lyle?” Sheppard asked.

  A darker mood clamped down on Kartauk. His expression seemed to be veiled in shadow. “North Carolina, around Raleigh. Ray apparently worked as a security guard at a local college. In December of 1974, Lyle was hit by a car. He died.”

  Kartauk stared into his mug for so long that it was as if his soul had left the room altogether.

  “The wheels in Ray’s fuzzy brain must’ve started turning and he set out to find Joy and Spenser. Ray didn’t have the benefit of the Internet, but it didn’t take him long to find her, to claim his other son. I urged her all the time to change her name to something else, but she never did. Maybe if I pushed her harder, she would still be alive and we wouldn’t be sitting here now.” His voice turned thick with regret. “Five months later, Ray nabbed Spenser, torched the inside of the house, and Joy died.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “Now the boy has returned as a man and done to someone else what was done to him.”

  This was the same thing Mira had told them, was what the photos had proven, and now Kartauk was saying it. How much more confirmation did they need?

  “How can you be so sure?” Goot asked.

  Kartauk’s hands dropped away from his face. “You mean, you didn’t know?”

  “Yeah, we knew.” Sheppard opened his file and removed the juvenile photos of Spenser Wickett Timble and the artist’s sketch that had been made based on the reporter’s description of the man on the bike. He placed them side by side and gave Kartauk the brief version of the juvenile record and the vehicular hom
icide charge. “We got lucky.”

  Kartauk stared at the two photos, then tapped the eyes on both. “It’s right there. The eyes tell everything. A face is smooth at seventeen, gets crow’s-feet by thirty-five, wrinkles by fifty, and looks like parchment by eighty. But the eyes never change. It’s Spenser. I’d know those eyes anywhere.”

  “Do you think he remembers being abducted?” Goot asked.

  “I doubt it. The mind has a way of closing off painful memories, especially those that happen when we’re young. And I think it’s part of what drives him.”

  “He hasn’t demanded a ransom,” Sheppard said. “The only contact he has made is a DVD of himself and Adam that he gave to a Telemundo reporter.” As Sheppard explained, he brought out a copy of the DVD and set it on the table. “I’d appreciate it if you would take a look at it when you can and call me.”

  “Sick fuck,” Kartauk murmured, turning the case over in his hands.

  “Other than some deep psychological thing about doing what was done to him, what do you think his motive is for taking Adam?” Sheppard asked.

  “Did you ever read A Boy Called It?”

  Mira had given him many books over the years and he often had trouble remembering what he’d read, skimmed, or set aside. But this one had stuck with him. “Dave Pelzer. Child abuse. Supposedly true story. Written by the guy who lived through it.” Parts of the book had been so horrific that he’d felt physically ill. “You read it, Goot?”

  “One chapter. I couldn’t get beyond that.”

  “Well, here’s the curious thing about human nature,” Kartauk went on. “Given what Pelzer went through, he might have grown up to become a serial killer. A rapist. Or a child abuser himself. But that’s not how his destiny unfolded. I don’t doubt for a second that Spenser went through some of the things that Pelzer did. Ray was an alcoholic sadist, a twisted fuck. Spenser was six when Ray took him and—what? Sixteen or seventeen when the trailer fire happened?”

  “Seventeen,” Sheppard said.

  “That’s eleven years of extreme abuse, during an era when people looked the other way. If it had been me, I would’ve tried to kill the bastard. I don’t have Pelzer’s capacity for forgiveness.” He sat forward, fingers laced together. “I’m betting that the only happy years Spenser has known were between the ages of one and six. And because the mind is such a curious thing, because it can compartmentalize and rationalize and be duped into forgetting, I don’t think he has a conscious clue. Except I think a part of him remembers the house. The house as a symbol of when he was happy. He may not verbalize it in that context. He may not consciously know why he took Adam. In that sense, he could be reenacting what happened to him. But I’m pretty damn sure that what he wants is the house.”

  The house? Sheppard rolled that around, testing it against some inner standard that had developed during his two decades in law enforcement. I want what you have. That was one of the motives Tina had mentioned on the beach. Moments ticked past. No one spoke. He felt Goot doing the same thing that he was. They looked at each other. Kartauk looked at them.

  “And how would taking Adam get him the house?”

  Kartauk shrugged, palms facing the ceiling. “Who the hell knows? I’m just giving you my best theory.”

  Sheppard felt that the psychological impact of abuse was probably true, but he didn’t buy Kartauk’s theory about I want your house. “We’re missing six years of Spenser’s life,” Sheppard told Kartauk. “From around 1987 to 1993, between when he left Seattle and ended up in Silicon Valley. Until we know what he did during those years, I don’t think we have the final answer about his motive or what he intends to do with Adam. And on a whole other level, there’s the glaring coincidence that both he and the Nicholses have lived in the Mango Hill house.”

  Kartauk nodded. “Yeah, coincidences really beg for interpretation, don’t they? Kind of makes you feel that there’s a design in the universe that we’ll never understand.”

  “Any idea what Spenser may have done during those six years?” Goot asked.

  “Not a clue,” Kartauk replied.

  After Ross Blake dropped Suki off at the back of the house, she made sure that Paul was gone-to where? A hotel? His girlfriend’ place? Then she collapsed on the couch in the living room and dozed fitfully. She dreamed, but the dreams were as disjointed as her life, like snippets of colorized movies.

  In one, Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz sang like Elvis Presley, shaking her hips and practically making love to the microphone. In another, Robert De Niro as the bad doctor in Godsend assured her he could clone Adam, no problem, and Nicole Kidman, looking like the pale ghost mother in The Others, warned Suki not to trust him, then ran around the room, jerking the black curtains across the windows. Suki bolted awake, sheathed in sweat, the air noisy with the hammering of rain against the roof.

  She wandered into Adam’s room and crawled onto his bed, clutched the gray Fids bear to her chest, and wept. It disgusted her. Served no purpose. Got her nowhere. Bottom line? She no longer knew her direction, her location, her place in the larger scheme of things. It was as if she had misplaced the compass of her life.

  Shower, she thought. A shower would wake her up, wash away the heat, get her moving. She turned her phone back on and set it on a shelf above the toilet in Adam’s bathroom. It was as tidy in here as it was in his bedroom. The towels were fresh, the soap was new, unscented Dove, the only kind he used.

  Stacked on the back of the toilet were half-a-dozen books that ranged from the latest Harry Potter to books on theoretical physics by Michio Kaku to Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s The Invitation. It occurred to her that she didn’t know what Adam thought about what he read. She knew he had tried to talk to her about it—in the car, on their occasional bike rides together, sometimes at breakfast or dinner. But her mind usually had been elsewhere, or she and Paul had been arguing, or the phone had been ringing, or they’d had guests. It must have seemed to Adam that he fell somewhere behind the trash collector in his mother’s priorities.

  Gladys, surrogate mom, friend and confidante, had known more about Adam’s thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, than she did.

  Her phone beeped repeatedly, signaling that she had received dozens of messages. She ignored it and stepped into the shower, under the cold, unforgiving spray. The needles stung her spine, her face, her eyelids. She pressed her palms to the wall, zipped herself up inside her son’s skin, and saw the accretion of her betrayals, the subtle messages that must have told him to butt out, that he was an inconvenience, a postscript, that he didn’t count.

  She stood in the stall, not moving, waiting for self-disgust to work its way out and away. Her cell rang repeatedly, then fell silent. When she finally turned the shower off, the stillness in the stall seemed deafening, eerie. Yet she felt calmer, more accepting of her monumental flaws, her numerous camouflages, her bullshit. She thought it might be time for her to get out of the movies, leave while she was at the top of her game and before she lost her soul completely.

  Some women in this business—Streep, Sarandon, Jolie—seemed to be able to hold onto their intrinsic selves, their families and private lives, without compromising themselves or their children. But she wasn’t like them. Her compromises had begun fifteen years ago, when she had married the wrong man and hadn’t told him that Adam was not his son.

  She stepped out, wrapped a towel around herself, picked up her cell phone, her umbilical cord to the larger world. Suki clicked through the messages—her agent, her manager, her PR person, two directors, a producer, several journalists. She deleted all the numbers, put on clean clothes that she kept in the linen closet in the hall, combed her hair, and went into Paul’s study.

  What did he do in here all day? In the weeks before the hurricane, he had spent eight and ten hours a day in this room, typing away on his computer, supposedly working on a new book, a new script, and creating new material for his courses this fall. But she hadn’t seen anything he had written. He had shut
that door a long time ago.

  In the early days of their marriage, they had spent long, intimate hours brainstorming for stories, characters, plots. In those days, they had been partners in the truest sense of the word. Paul had screened the scripts that had arrived, covered them with notes about how she could play this or that character if this detail or that plot device were changed. He’d had the eye. And she had done the same thing for the scripts that crossed his desk.

  Then things had started to go wrong. They had faltered in their attention to each other, to the marriage. But perhaps the attention hadn’t been there to begin with. Maybe it had been a sham, just another layer of camouflage. For the last several years, she had screened her own scripts. Acid Trip, her Oscar movie, was based on a script Paul had rejected. Hate it, he’d written in the margin. Ridiculous. Do this one at your own peril.

  And she had selected the script because that “peril” had appealed to her.

  She plugged his Mac into the extension cord in the hall that connected to the generator. Granted, she was no computer nerd. Programming was beyond her skills. But thanks to her son’s expertise with computers, she knew enough to search for what bothered her. And after poking around for a while, she found it in a hidden file, e-mail exchanges between Paul and a woman who called herself “paradise.”

  There must have been hundreds of exchanges, spanning a period of at least fourteen months:

  I wish I could write something cool, but I still feel u inside me, hot and wet and forever. You must, absolutely must, finish your script. U are on the right track, I really feel it, and oh please, Paul, come 2 me tomorrow or the next day or the day after that

  luv, paradise

  Hon, have five scenes that I love, a million other scenes that suck-You give me courage. WilI call u this week

  Loving u

  Paul

  Hon. When was the last time Paul had called her hon? As Suki clicked through the e-mails, she counted dozens of exchanges like these. Then there were dozens more concerning arrangements—where they would meet, when, the lies and cover-ups. More recently, in the last several months, the exchanges sounded different on his part, more reserved, as though he were pulling back, getting tired of her, bored. But he couldn’t quite break it off.