The Survivors Club

by J. Carson Black

  Then she went to dinner with Alec Sheppard. The food was good. The conversation, better. However much she liked him the first time they went out together, she liked him even more now.

  She went up to his room for a nightcap.

  Not advisable. She knew she was letting herself in for big trouble. He was too attractive, too decent, too nice, too smart, too good a man for it not to cause a major wrinkle in her life, but it was all operations go from the moment they stepped inside. She wanted him and he obviously wanted her. It started to get warm and then hot, and Tess realized she was equal parts attracted to Alec Sheppard and angry with Max.

  It was hard to stop. Like a pilot trying to pull a plane out of a dive. He wasn’t just a good kisser, but a good toucher, a good hugger, a good feeler, and she was getting to the point—quickly—where she would not be able to stop.

  She might be there now.

  They were more urgent now, lips, mouths, tongues, hands, hips, molding each other into an approximation of the act but with clothing between them—it was impossible.

  They tangled on the bed. She unbuttoned his shirt. She ran her fingers down his chest and then below that. He was doing plenty of research on his own. It seemed physically impossible to break away.

  Too late…too late.

  But there was Max.

  Maybe she and Max were over, but she couldn’t do it this way.

  She managed to pull away. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done.

  She said, “I’m in a relationship.”

  Alec looked at her. His face was a mirror of hers. Not shock exactly. He wasn’t bereft, or brokenhearted, or disappointed. More like the rug had been pulled out from under him and he’d hit the ground flat on his chin.

  She felt the same way.

  He sat up, rubbed his neck. Looked away.

  “I’m in a relationship,” Tess said. “It’s…problematic.” Then she added in a rush of words, “I can’t add to that, to our troubles. I have to…I have to think about it and I have to figure out if I want to stay with him.”

  She was aware that she sounded like she was pleading.

  He sat still beside her. He blew air out of his lips. Looked into the middle distance and then down at his hands.

  A good-looking man.

  A man she liked being around.

  A man she could maybe, possibly, fall in love with.

  But she wasn’t going to do it this way. “I’m sorry, Alec.”

  “I know.”

  She managed to pull herself together. Uncrimp and straighten her clothes. Tell her body to stop screaming at the top of its horny little lungs.

  She heard herself say, “I want to keep in touch.”

  Then she bolted out into the chilly spring night.

  Wondering just how much more she could screw up her life.

  As Tess headed for her car, her phone chimed. It was Barry Zudowsky.

  “I got a sketch artist with Frieda Nussman today. I’m going to send you a photo of her sketch.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “No. Let me send it to you.”

  He disconnected. Tess knew he was done.

  A few moments later she was staring into the face of the man who had purchased the mountain lion.

  She’d seen the face before—twice. In the first picture she’d seen of him, he’d been thirteen years old, standing at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a water treatment plant. He’d lost the baby fat he’d had as a child but had retained the passivity in his expression. She recalled the more recent version of him from the family portrait in Tucson Lifestyle.

  As a young man, his mane of blond hair was streaked with white from hours, days, months, and years of the surfing life in California. His face had become more angular and was deeply tanned. Chad DeKoven was a true boy of summer.

  He was also a gamer like his brother, Michael, and his sister Jaimie.

  He was part of it.

  Tess looked for an address for DeKoven. He lived in Laguna Beach. She was able to access the DMV files, and this in turn yielded his phone number.

  She sat in the car and considered how she would approach him. If he was a killer as she suspected, he would stonewall her. She knew she would only tip him off if she approached him head-on. She knew she’d need to do an end run around his defenses, run a game on him, but right now she couldn’t think of anything. So she decided to call and see if he was there. She used her home phone to punch in his number.

  A canned message sounded. Chad DeKoven’s phone had been disconnected.

  There was one person she hadn’t yet talked to, other than Chad—Brayden DeKoven McConnell.

  CHAPTER 33

  Brayden McConnell lived in a very nice townhouse in Ventana Canyon at the foot of the Santa Catalina Mountains.

  The first thing Tess noticed was a wood gilt-edged sign beside the door said, “Brayden McConnell, Real Estate Law.”

  She rang the lighted bell.

  No answer. She tried again. Nothing. She was walking back to the car when Brayden answered.

  Brayden’s hair was pulled up messily in a clip. She wore a sweatshirt and purple drawstring velveteen sweatpants, none too clean. But she was pretty in a plain, sweet way. She looked nothing like the whippet-thin Jaimie or comic-book-hero-handsome Michael.

  She kept the door between them, her pale eyes wide, sad, and frightened at the same time.

  “Oh, I thought you were the babysitter.” She started to close the heavy door. Tess was practiced at putting her foot between the door and the jamb. Thinking: you’re going out like that? “Just a couple of questions, I’m a detective with Santa Cruz County.” She nodded to the shield clipped to her belt.

  “This is Pima County.”

  “I’d like to talk to you anyway. I can come back with a TPD detective if you’d like, or we can go to TPD midtown.”

  “Might as well. “ She opened the door and led the way inside.

  Tess pulled the door shut behind her.

  Nice place, expensive furnishings, but sparse. Tess knew Brayden was divorced. It looked like someone had taken half of everything.

  Her little girl, Aurora, was shy at first. They sat on a couple of sofas, and Aurora warmed up quickly, showing her dance steps and eventually building up to running around them shrieking, and alternately crawling onto Tess’s lap.

  “I’d like to ask you about your brother, Chad.”

  “Isn’t that a little soon?”

  “Soon?”

  Brayden played with her hair clip, kept poking stray strands of hair into her chignon or whatever it was. “My brother Chad was a really good guy. A sweetheart. That’s all you need to know.”

  Something off, here. Brayden sounded defiant. She’d said “was” a good guy. Tess summoned up the photo of the artist sketch on her phone. “Do you recognize him?”

  Brayden stared open-mouthed at the sketch. Then she started to whimper. “He just died,” Brayden said. “Can’t you leave it alone for a little while?”

  Then Aurora chimed in. She clung to her mother and started to wail.

  Tess was shocked. That was why Chad’s phone was disconnected. “When did this happen?”

  “I don’t think I should talk to you—it’s personal.”

  “Brayden, the sketch I showed you links him to a homicide in Orange County,” Tess lied. It merely linked him to an animal that might have been used in one. But Tess needed the upper hand now.

  “What do you want from me? I don’t care and I think you should go and leave us alone. We just had a long airplane ride and Aurora’s having nightmares and she’s breaking out! She has pimples! She’s sick to her stomach and it isn’t fair, so why are you here? You’re harassing us and it’s just plain mean and I’m sorry, I’m really really sorry, excuse me, but you should come back tomorrow or maybe go harass Michael because I don’t know anything and my daughter’s stomach needs to be settled!”

  The kid was shrieking. Brayden kept on talking, none of it makin
g sense. Just a barrage of words, throwing them at Tess like weapons. At first Tess thought the woman really was in shock, but it soon occurred to her that Brayden was able to avoid specifics by babbling. Her voice was so low even as she said paranoid and angry things, and Aurora’s voice was so loud. It was like trying to listen to a babbling stream under a band saw.

  It occurred to Tess that they were a good team. Brayden was stonewalling her. Brayden babbling and Aurora crying: a one-two punch.

  Fracturing Tess’s concentration. “Can you tell me how Chad died?”

  “Why are you such a ghoul? Why do you care? He’s dead, not that you or anyone else cares anything about him.” She paused. “All right, Miss Ghoul. You want to know? Somebody murdered him! Someone killed my brother.”

  “Can you tell me—”

  She looked into Tess’s eyes. “I don’t know anything, except that somebody killed him. He was just going surfing, he was just a harmless adult kid, and somebody just throttled him and left him out there like they’d throw away a Dixie cup—like so much trash!”

  Tess waited for the crying to subside. Either Brayden was suffering from histrionic personality disorder, or she was using the drama to stave off questions. And the daughter took her cues from the mother.

  Tess held out the sketch again. “Is this Chad?”

  Brayden stopped sobbing and looked. “It doesn’t even look like him. But he wouldn’t do anything to hurt anyone. If you think he’s involved in anything bad like that, you’re barking up the wrong tree, and I’m not saying anything more.”

  “Bad like what?”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “You’re with the police. You wouldn’t be showing me his picture if you were planning to give him the Surfer Dude of the Year Award.”

  “Do you know Steve Barkman?”

  “Who?”

  Tess showed her a photo of Steve Barkman.

  “No. Who’s he?”

  “You don’t know who he is?”

  “I might have heard the name. But I don’t know where. Why are you torturing me like this? I just lost my brother.”

  “So you never met this man?”

  “No.”

  Tess reminded herself Brayden was a lawyer. And apparently a damn good one.

  “Do you know a man named Alec Sheppard?”

  “Another one? Who are all these people? No I don’t know him!”

  “Alec Sheppard. Are you sure you’ve never heard that name? Maybe when you were in Atlanta?”

  Brayden McConnell looked at her as if she were nuts. “Atlanta. Next I suppose you’re going to say I live on the North Pole. You come in here asking me all this crap when I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Well here’s something I want to know. If you’re going to keep asking me stuff, why don’t you tell me what it’s all about? And why don’t you use your pull with Laguna Beach PD to get some answers?” Brayden pulled her daughter onto her lap and held her as if she were afraid Tess would grab her any minute.

  Tess knew when she was being sandbagged.

  Time to give up—for now. Tess stood. “Thank you for your time.”

  “No problem.”

  Seriously?

  Tess was relieved when the door closed behind her—and glad to get out from under.

  Score one for Brayden DeKoven McConnell and her daughter, Aurora.

  Lawyers of the year.

  Tess positioned herself about seven homes up the street, backing the SUV into a driveway and killing her lights. A large palo verde tree partially screened her. There was only one way out of the neighborhood.

  She waited.

  A half hour went by. She did not hear a garage door roll up. She did not see taillights back out. No car came by. Another hour. Same thing. She waited another half hour. Nobody drove into the neighborhood.

  Brayden wasn’t going anywhere. She had not been spooked.

  Tess started up the engine, put the car in gear, and headed down out of Tucson to the freeway toward home.

  She felt as if she’d been put through the wringer. She had a bad feeling about Brayden. Not just that she was good at barrage tactics, but because there was one moment when Tess sensed something besides just good tactics.

  Tess had kept her eyes on Brayden’s face every moment. She was distracted by the little girl, she had a hard time following the line of bullshit Brayden was handing her, but she never once took her eyes away from that sweet face and those big little-girl eyes.

  And there was one moment when the mask slipped.

  Some well-turned phrase, maybe. She’d seen it—raw triumph.

  As if Brayden, behind her sweet little-girl exterior, behind the shocked and grieving sister, was playing her.

  CHAPTER 34

  Lying prone—in the same position he’d taken on the hill above George Hanley’s final resting place on the day of his funeral—the watcher conducted his surveillance from a knoll above Wolfe Manor Performance Horses. His Bushnell 10X42 Fusion 1600 ARC laser rangefinder binoculars were as good as they come.

  It was still early in the day—not six a.m. yet. But horse people got up early.

  His binocs followed Jaimie Wolfe as she fed the horses. Her movements were agitated and disjointed. She was shaken. She was worried and harried and scared and angry. He could hear it in the banging buckets and the yelled “Quit!” and the way she dumped flakes of hay so that some of it got tangled in her hair and in her face and she had to sneeze.

  He thought she was crying. It was hard to tell from here. She sped through the feeding and went to the house and came out a few minutes later with a stack of papers, probably from her printer. She pulled the truck door open with force and hopped in and whammed the door shut. There was a moment where the truck didn’t move. He could see her, bent over the steering wheel, bent forward over the dash, her loose hair falling forward. He didn’t see her shoulders shaking, but he thought she might be crying.

  Right now, she was thinking her dog was lost. And she wanted it back. She was desperate to get it back, and at this point, as much as she was in despair, she still had hope.

  Hope could be dashed. But first things first. Let her experience hope and then get let down by it. It would be the first in a series of disappointments for her.

  This was only Round One.

  CHAPTER 35

  The next morning, Tess tracked down the detective working the Chad DeKoven case in Laguna Beach. It was a short phone conversation, mainly because Detective Pete Morales had so little to go by.

  “I didn’t tell the family, but it looked like a professional killing.” He described the chokehold that had been used. “Quick and efficient. Nothing was stolen. The kid had an expensive board—a limited edition called a ‘Sacrilege,’ It wasn’t taken. I find that significant.”

  “Any thoughts on a possible motive?”

  “It’s a puzzle. Offhand, it seems there was no reason. He didn’t have any enemies, was an easygoing kid, kind of did his own thing. More than one friend used the term “harmless.” My thinking is that whoever killed him was either in law enforcement, maybe military or former military, or someone who studied martial arts. They knew what they were doing.”

  “Male?”

  “Probably.”

  “Nothing stolen from his house?”

  “His place is a mess. I don’t know where they’d begin. The cottage was unlocked and undisturbed, as far as we could tell. We had a crime scene tech go through it—nothing remarkable except for his quiver.”

  “Quiver?”

  “His collection of boards. Massive—and all of them expensive, some of them one of a kind.”

  “None missing?”

  “Can’t be sure of that, but it doesn’t appear to be. That room was locked. It was an add-on, especially to keep his boards. The lock was intact.”

  “How did the family react?” Thinking of Brayden last night.

  A pause. “They were an oddball lot. Prickly with each other over little things. The youngest,
Brayden uh…” He checked his notes. “McConnell, cried nonstop. People get strange, as you know, when they are grieving, or shocked by something like this. So it’s hard to judge.”

  Tess asked him to keep her updated, and he agreed to send her a copy of the report.

  Her phone rang again almost immediately. It was Detective Cheryl Tedesco.

  Another drive to Tucson. This time to meet an assistant prosecutor who had called Tedesco about her meeting with Steve Barkman.

  Tess met Cheryl at Barista, a coffee place downtown that catered to the people going in and out of the courthouse.

  Cheryl ran it down for her, that an assistant prosecutor named Melinda Bayless had witnessed an altercation between her friend Brayden McConnell and Steve Barkman.

  Melinda Bayless looked like a young lawyer on her way up. She wore a black pantsuit and black shoes with medium heels. Her hair was blonde and blunt cut down to her shoulders. She carried a briefcase. She might be twenty-seven, she might be thirty, she might be thirty-two. The deep salmon lipstick matched her blouse. She saw them and knew immediately who they were. They all introduced one another, three professional women, and lined up to get coffee at the counter. They sat in tall chairs at a table in the corner, the quietest spot in a roomful of babble.

  As usual, Tess played the role of an observer.

  For a lawyer, Melinda Bayless was pretty straightforward. She used her hands a lot, long tapered fingers, beautifully manicured nails painted the same color as her blouse.

  Melinda said, “He came on to Brayden. At first Daffy—that’s our friend, Daphne Morales, she’s also an attorney—at first she and I were envious.” Brushed a strand of hair back. “Well, not envious, exactly. But he was good-looking. When I was younger, that was the main criteria, but we’re all older now and good looks are great but they’re certainly not enough.”