Scorcher fc-2

by John Lutz

  Nadine jerked her head high and held it there, staring down at Carver. “You’ve been talking to Dr. Elsing.” This wasn’t fair; Carver had been caught cheating at whatever game they were playing. Seeing Dr. Elsing had been against the rules, maybe even off the board.

  “The police know Paul was on medication to control his schizophrenia, Nadine.”

  A wave made it far enough up the beach to lick at the toe of one of her already wet shoes. She didn’t move. Foam sloshed around Carver’s cane planted in the sand. “There’s no way I can get any of those pills,” Nadine said. “They’re strong stuff, prescription medicine. Only a doctor can help Paul that way.”

  “You tell Paul that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you take him pills he already had in his room?”

  She shot a dark look at Carver. “How did you know that?”

  “A guess. You’re his only sister, and a devoted one.”

  “You got that part right, Mr. Carver.”

  “If Paul’s innocent, why’s he running?”

  “Stupid question. He found out you and the police were looking for him, and read in the newspapers he was the chief suspect. He had no choice other than to run.”

  “Smart answer. But has it occurred to you that the reason all the evidence points to him and he’s running is that he’s guilty? Despite what he told you.”

  She gazed out at a large incoming wave and laughed hopelessly, shaking her head. “I told Paul you wouldn’t believe. You’re on a revenge mission; it’s as obvious as if it were stamped on your forehead like some kind of biblical mark. You want Paul’s blood.”

  “I don’t equate what I’m doing with religion.”

  “You should. It’s ages old and twisted, even if it’s fresh in you. It controls you. You’re lost in it. You must be, to have done what you did. Vengeance can be a religion, don’t you think?”

  She was grown-up, all right. But not quite far enough to realize how badly people needed their faith, twisted or otherwise.

  “Explain away the evidence,” Carver said, “and I’ll try to believe Paul.”

  “I can’t explain it away. Neither can Paul. If he could, he wouldn’t be running.” Quite logical, in its fashion.

  “I guess you’re going to tell the rest of the family about me?” Carver said.

  “No. Paul made me promise not to. He sees you as his only hope. The only one who can help him.”

  Stunned, Carver lifted the tip of his cane a few inches, then drove it back into the sand, as if trying to spear something elusive out of sight below the surface. “He knows who I am, and he expects me to help him?”

  “He thinks you’re a better bet than the police to get at the truth.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Sure.”

  “He’s even craftier than I thought.”

  “Or else he’s innocent.”

  Carver looked beyond Nadine at a figure descending the wooden steps by the boathouse. Joel Dewitt. Nadine noticed something had grabbed Carver’s attention and turned her head to look.

  Dewitt was striding toward them along the beach now, five feet beyond where the surf was spreading like white lace and then reluctantly backwashing to the sea. He was walking heavily, heels kicking up the sand. His shallow footprints seemed insubstantial, at the mercy of the stiff breeze off the endless Atlantic.

  “He’ll want to know what we’re talking about,” Carver said.

  Nadine nodded. “I suppose he will. I’m planning on telling him. You object?”

  “Would it make a difference?”

  “Sure. It might make it more fun.”

  Carver didn’t shoot back. He couldn’t blame her for not liking the man who was after her brother.

  When Dewitt reached them, he tried a grin but it quickly rearranged itself into a grimace. His lower lip was swollen and split, and not for smiling. He touched a knuckle lightly to the lip, then drew it away and examined a speck of blood on it. He looked at Carver and wiped the blood from the knuckle with his other hand, rubbing his fist tightly, the way a pitcher rubs a baseball before launching it toward home plate. If he rubbed hard enough, it would be as if the blood had never been there and his lip was all right.

  “Hope I didn’t hurt the idiot,” he said. “How’d he seem after I left?”

  “You might have cracked some of his ribs,” Carver said. “Maybe he’s hurt worse than that.”

  Dewitt looked miserable and shrugged. “Lost my temper. It doesn’t happen very often.”

  “You looked in control to me,” Carver said.

  “Yeah. That’s how it is when I really get mad. I get kinda calm at the same time.” The ocean breeze plastered his pale blue shirt to his body. The front of the shirt was bloodstained. Drips. Spatters. Unlikely bold patterns that reminded Carver of abstract art. Dewitt glanced at Nadine, back at Carver. “What’s going on here? More secrets?”

  Nadine explained to him that she’d met Paul last night, and told him of Paul’s claim of innocence. She didn’t tell him that one of Paul’s victims was Carver’s son, and that Carver had conned the family into hiring him.

  Dewitt dabbed at his split lip again with a knuckle. “Paul might be using you, Nadine, making you an accessory to murder. That’s major trouble, babe. Sorta thing can mess up your life. I think, for Paul’s sake as well as yours, you oughta tell Carver where he is.” The extended stretch of talking caused fresh blood to ooze from the lip.

  “But I don’t know where Paul is. He was afraid I might be pressured into revealing his whereabouts, so he kept that a secret from me.”

  Dewitt shuffled his pointy black loafers on the damp sand, staring down at the odd indentations the smooth leather soles were leaving on the beach. More surreal artwork, indecipherable and temporary. “Okay, don’t tell even if you know. You love the guy. He’s lucky.” He managed a painful smile. “Hell, I’m lucky, too. For the same reason, even if it’s a different kinda love.”

  Nadine, the reason, lit up like neon and leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Would you know how to get in touch with Paul again?” Carver asked.

  “No,” Nadine said. “He said he’d contact me if he wanted to talk again. He’s being careful; you can’t blame him for that.”

  Carver felt like telling her that mass murderers usually were careful, until near the end when they killed more and more often, riding their relentless compulsion to oblivion. Which maybe was what they yearned for all along. He knew it would be useless to point this out to Nadine, to tell her about the woman in Orlando and what her death might signify. Paul, with or without his medication, was probably going to take more lives, with less time between murders. He was losing control.

  “Think Paul would meet with me?” Carver asked Nadine.

  “Maybe. Under certain, safe circumstances.”

  “If he contacts you again, will you tell him I want a meeting? Only to talk, to get his side. He can arrange it so he’s safe.”

  “Sure, I’ll tell him. If I talk to him again.”

  The waves were building higher, curling in on themselves as they met the undertow from shore-“tubing,” as the surfers called it. Maybe it meant a storm was moving in, though the sky was blue except for a couple of broken white slashes very high. They might have been clinging vapor from a jet plane, marring the heavens like scrawls from a giant hand.

  “Want to go back up to the house?” Nadine asked, staring at Dewitt intensely and deliberately excluding Carver.

  “No,” Dewitt said. “Fanning’s up there with your father. Let’s walk the beach awhile and talk.”

  Nick Fanning again. Carver wondered just how Fanning fit into the Kave family equation in matters other than business. How much did he know? How much did he pretend not to know?

  Carver left Nadine and Joel Dewitt prowling the angry edge of the sea. Then he drove to a roadside phone and called Emmett Kave in Kissimmee.

  He asked the same promise of Emmett: If Paul
contacted him again, would he try to set up a meeting with Carver? In a safe place where they would talk and nothing more.

  Emmett agreed, but he skeptically asked Carver why he wanted the meeting, if it was for a reason other than tricking Paul into getting caught. Wary Emmett; a survivor of the jungle.

  Carver told him he was having doubts about Paul’s guilt. It would help if he could talk face-to-face with Paul, and straighten out some problems regarding the evidence. A plausible He.

  When he hung up the phone and got back in the baking Olds, he sat for a while perspiring, staring without focus through the insect-dashed windshield and seeing nothing but opaque swimming patterns of heat.

  Chapter 28

  Carver met Edwina for lunch at The Happy Lobster on the coast highway. They sat at a table near the long curved window that looked out on the sea. Far offshore, half a dozen sailboats resembled brightly colored shark fins cutting the glittering surface in rough formation. They appeared to be racing, describing a circular course that would deliver them across an invisible finish line at the point where they’d started. How the world worked, perhaps.

  Edwina had ordered the seafood salad, Carver the broiled shrimp. They were sipping drinks and munching fried zucchini appetizers dipped in horseradish sauce.

  Carver had called Van Meter and had him pull everyone off surveillance except for a man to continue watching over Edwina. It was up to Paul Kave now to contact Nadine or Emmett. And up to Nadine or Emmett to arrange a meeting and call Carver. It all seemed so easy that it was bound to turn into trouble.

  “So what did Laura say to you?” Carver asked. He dipped a zucchini slice and popped it into his mouth, chewed and washed it down with a sip of Budweiser. He hadn’t had much breakfast and it tasted terrific.

  “Awkward small talk at first,” Edwina said, “then she got around to saying she didn’t understand how I could let you get caught up in a vendetta without trying to stop you.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing. She’s right; she doesn’t understand. Pass the horseradish.”

  Carver slid the small plate the necessary few inches across the white tablecloth. Edwina delicately dipped and ate two zucchini slices. She seemed absorbed in the task. The scent of the cheese sprinkled over the hot zucchini mingled with that of the tangy sauce. Watching her savor the stuff made Carver even hungrier. They were both starving and where was food they could really attack?

  He said, “Laura’s worried about how it will affect Ann if something happens to me. She wants this all to end for Ann, for both of them. It makes sense.”

  “It does if you love your daughter more than your former husband.”

  He took another long pull of beer, then set the damp glass down precisely on its cork coaster. Outside, in the hazy distance, seabirds were circling high over the slanted colorful sails. Nearer to shore a man in white shorts and shirt was jockeying an outboard runabout down the coast, standing staunchly at the wheel to peer over the boat’s Plexiglas windscreen. The waves were giving him a wild ride; probably that was what he wanted.

  “Laura’s threatening to tell the Kave family who I am,” Carver said. “I think she means it.”

  “Bet on it,” Edwina said. She craned her neck, anticipating the arrival of their waiter. He was across the room, leisurely taking the orders of a table of executive types; he knew an expense-account-size tip shaping up when he saw one.

  “She’ll be hanging around this part of Florida till this thing’s resolved,” Carver said. “She might talk to you again, try to get to me through you.”

  “I doubt it. I told her you were compelled to do what you thought needed doing. She said it was a mistake. I told her maybe it was, but it was your mistake and neither of us had the right to keep you from making it. I asked her if she wanted to see her son’s killer caught. She said she didn’t care, it wouldn’t make any difference to her or to him. I told her if you were fucked-up, so was she. I’m starving; where’s the food?”

  Carver grinned. “I wish I’d overheard that conversation.”

  “No you don’t,” Edwina said. “There was more.” But she didn’t elaborate. Her green-flecked eyes were unemotional. She said, “Laura’s interested in more than your daughter’s welfare. You do know that, don’t you?”

  He looked out again at the distant sails. “Maybe she is. A child dies, it does something to both parents that draws them toward each other, I guess. They’re the only ones who understand the depth of the grief, the pain. It’s a lonely place to be.”

  “I know. And I can’t be there with you.”

  “Yeah. But Laura coming down here and trying to talk me out of looking for Paul Kave, it might be the pain and loneliness that made her do it. I suppose I feel sorry for her. And she feels sorry for me. Some things develop between people and they can’t help it.”

  Edwina said, “I’m going to eat this last zucchini.” And did.

  The waiter finally glided over with their food, and Carver and Edwina asked for fresh drinks. He slowly made note of that in a leather-covered order pad.

  “I’d like mine before the ice melts,” Edwina told him. Feisty today. The waiter let it bounce off and coasted away at half speed. A professional.

  “Get the insurance claim in on the house?” Carver asked.

  “This morning. I think the place might always smell like burned tires, though. Compliments of Paul Kave.” She tore a roll in half and buttered it.

  “I put you in danger,” Carver said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. That’s what life comes down to sometimes, putting other people in danger and them willing. Nothing you can do that won’t make ripples that might become waves. Or might swamp boats.”

  “Two members of the Kave family already know who I am,” Carver said. He told Edwina about his oceanside conversation with Nadine.

  “Was there ever anything between Nick Fanning and Nadine?” Edwina asked.

  He thought that was a curious reaction to his story. He’d hardly mentioned Fanning in his recounting of what had happened at the estate that morning.

  Edwina must have read the puzzlement on his face, though her gaze was fixed higher, on his tanned, bald head, as if his thoughts might be printed there. “From what you’ve told me about him, and her, it seems a real possibility. The virile friend and business subordinate of the father, the rebellious daughter, the frequency of Fanning’s visits to the house. The setup might seem like a sexual challenge to a man like Fanning. Or to a girl like Nadine. Kind of thing you see on soap operas everyday.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with the notion,” Carver said. “Anyway, whatever might have happened, it’s irrelevant now. Nadine’s too in love with Dewitt to see a wart on him.”

  “Lucky Nadine.”

  “You mean Dewitt.”

  “No, Nadine.”

  Carver slid his plate of shrimp nearer to him. The smooth white china was warm. He couldn’t imagine Nadine involved with Fanning.

  “So how do you feel?” Edwina asked, forking a bite of salad into her mouth.

  “About what?”

  “Laura.”

  “I told you, I feel sorry for her. Probably pity is all she feels for me. Hell, we got a divorce, Edwina; we thought it all out years ago and called off living together.”

  “Numph,” Edwina said, around another bite of salad.

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m not sure she has it all thought out as thoroughly as you say. What love’s about is two people making a long-term investment in each other’s happiness, willing to go to the wall for each other. That’s what Laura doesn’t seem to understand. Maybe what you don’t quite understand.”

  “That’s a lot for one ‘numph,’ ”Carver said.

  “It only seems that way. Love’s actually a simple, one-syllable emotion.”

  The sea smell of the shrimp and Edwina’s salad was suddenly too much. Carver’s appetite left him, but the hollowness in his stomach made him queasy.
>
  He wasn’t sure how he felt about Laura. Or about Edwina, or Chipper, or Paul Kave, or about the wilderness he’d charged into and that had absorbed him.

  He sat back and stared out at the waves, rolling in murky, ever-changing patterns and darkened by sudden low clouds. It all kept kaleidoscoping in his mind: Laura, Edwina, Paul, Nadine, Adam, McGregor, and the dark, sad corpse of his only son.

  The ocean, vast and implacable, exerted a primal pull that was frightening.

  Chapter 29

  After leaving Edwina, Carver returned to the cottage and checked his answering machine. He’d received a call from Laura, and she’d left a number where she could be reached.

  Carver dragged out his dog-eared directory and looked up the phone number of the Andrew Johnson Motel. It was the number on Laura’s recorded message. He imagined her sitting in her room, staring at vapid afternoon television and wondering where some oversized roulette wheel would stop. Or lounging by the motel pool, sweating and not really liking the sun, waiting for his return call. She was far from home, from where she belonged.

  Carver decided not to return her call. Edwina was right about Laura’s renewed interest in him, and that scared him. He’d gone around the course once with Laura and didn’t want to again. Yet he knew that a mutually dependent attraction had been engendered by their son’s death, embryonic now, waiting to grow. She needed him, her fellow voyager through the mourning process. Carver didn’t want to need her.

  He punched the Play button again on the answering machine and listened to a wrong number, a pitch to buy into a time-share project in Clearwater before his rare opportunity was gone forever, and a reminder from his insurance agent that the premium was due on the Olds.

  Nothing from Emmett or Nadine Kave.

  Carver had barely eaten at lunch, but he was feeling better now and figured he’d soon be hungry. He clomped with his cane into the kitchenette and opened the refrigerator.

  Not an inspiring sight. Only two cans of beer, a small steak he’d allowed to go bad, and a container of yogurt that never had a chance. Edwina had bought the yogurt weeks ago. Carver loathed the stuff; it looked like cream trying to be something else.