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J. Carson Black
Hollywood superstar Max Conroy is A-list all the way—one of the few actors who can guarantee box office blockbusters on opening weekend. Max has it all: the devil-may-care charisma, the stunning movie star wife, and a sizable personal fortune that grows along with his legend.
When Max escapes from a rehab center in Arizona, disoriented and longing to return to his blue-collar roots, he becomes the target of a motley group of kidnappers planning to cash in by holding him for ransom. Max not only outsmarts them; he evens the score. Little does he know that a far more dangerous and merciless enemy is coming for him. But this time, he has an ally in the smart and beautiful sheriff’s deputy Tess McCrae.
For years, Max drifted through an easy superstar life, untethered and without purpose. But as he fights for his life, something turns inside him. He’s ready to live again—on his own terms. He will destroy those who’d rather see him die like an icon than live like a man.
To my fellow author and good friend William Simon,
who can always talk me down from the ledge.
Acknowledgments
MANY THANKS TO the people who helped make this book a reality: Deborah Schneider of Gelfman-Schneider Literary Agency; my editors, Courtney Miller of Thomas & Mercer and Charlotte Herscher; and to my friends and fellow writers for their helpfulness and unbending support: Sinclair Browning, Elizabeth Gunn, J.M. “Mike” Hayes, Carol Davis Luce, Susan Cummins Miller, Michael Prescott, Cheryl Shireman, and William Simon.
Thanks to my husband and publisher, Glenn McCreedy, and my wonderful mother, Mary Veronica Falk.
Prologue
Big Bear Lake, California
WHEN HE CONSIDERED all he’d had were textbooks, some of which he’d written himself, and a slide rule, retractable measuring tape, calculator, drafting pencil, and reams of notebook paper, Dr. Stephen DePaulentis was quite proud.
Stephen DePaulentis, MD, PhD, chief forensic pathologist with the Los Angeles Police Department (retired), member in good standing with the National Board of Medical Examiners, and frequent crime-scene expert on CNN, was well aware that his thirty-plus years of accumulated knowledge would go unappreciated in the cabin at Big Bear Lake.
But for the moment, he savored the magnitude of his accomplishment.
He’d discarded three prospective scenarios as impossible and stuck with the simplest solution to the problem presented him. Over a two-day period, he had gone over his projections from stem to stern. There were no holes.
He peered out the half-closed blinds of his cabin. A speedboat arrowed across the lake. Sunlight glistened on blue water. He wished he could be out there—
And realized, for the first time in eight months, he actually wanted to live. The heart bypass had kneecapped him, shrunk him, and the depression that followed was crushing. Now he felt useful again.
He heard a motion behind him. His captor.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” he said. “It’s all done.”
“Good,” his captor said.
“Everything’s worked out, the blood spatter, the trajectories, where to place the…” He looked at the still, quiet eyes and faltered. “At any rate, mission accomplished. You can simulate it on a computer. I’ve given you all the measurements, probabilities, forensics—everything.”
Abruptly, he felt deflated. Nothing left to say.
His captor held a takeout bag from The Lodge. Last night Dr. DePaulentis had asked for Kobe beef, and had gotten it. Not as good as you’d get in the restaurant, but good enough for takeout. Today it was poached salmon.
He tucked in while his captor read over his notes. They finished about the same time. His captor said, “Remarkable.”
“I think so.” He wiped his chin with the linen napkin that had come with the food. Wondered what his pals in the forensic biz would think.
As he set down his fork, he heard a snap behind him. It was a snap he recognized from years of donning latex gloves. He spun around. “What—?”
His captor looked at him with that stone face, eyes immovable in her head. One gloved hand held a semiautomatic. She nodded in the direction of the bathroom. He capitulated, walking ahead of her, his heart ramming its way up into his throat. He could hear the motorboat whining across the water, see the sun filter through the ponderosas between the blinds. The sky outside was a perfect, crystalline blue.
She stopped at the bathroom doorway. “Take off your clothes.”
“Can’t we talk about this? I have two grown daughters—”
She raised the gun to chest level. No point arguing. He removed his clothes, embarrassed by his white, flabby body, the scars on his chest. Covered himself with shaking hands.
“Get in the bathtub.”
He stepped in. What else could he do? The water had once been warm, but it was tepid now. She must have run it before she went to get his lunch.
“Sit.”
He sat in the tub, tried to keep his voice calm. “You don’t have to do this. I promised I’d keep quiet, and I will.”
She reached down by the sink and handed him a full bottle of wine. Good wine too, he noticed. “Drink,” she said.
“You can monitor my phone, my e-mails. I promise I won’t say anything.”
“Drink.”
No choice. He drank. Good wine or not, he barely tasted it. His mouth was sour with fear. He swallowed rapidly, like drinking from a fountain, wanting to be as drunk as possible.
His captor emptied a vial of pills into her hand. He recognized them immediately: secobarbital. He stared at the red capsules for a long time, his heart hammering in his ears. He wouldn’t get through this alive. His only choice was how.
He took a deep breath and reached out with surprisingly steady fingers. Picked the pills up delicately, one by one, from her outstretched palm and transferred them to his own, then placed them in his mouth.
Thinking, I did truly fine work.
He almost choked, his mouth was so dry.
But eventually, he swallowed them all.
I: DESERT CREATURES
Chapter One
THE WOMAN AND the boy came from LA. They drove a white 1999 Toyota Camry, which looked like a million other Toyota Camrys all over the West. The woman, who’d bought the car two days previously from a man in Anaheim, wanted something that would slip under the radar.
There was an “AAA” sticker on the back bumper. They’d argued about it. The woman for, the boy against. The boy thought that someone might notice the Triple A sticker, but the woman said the sticker hinted at solidity. Besides, she said, people don’t see Triple A stickers.
The woman won. She always won—she was the boss.
They’d started out at dawn, stopping in Banning for breakfast. No hurry. Detoured off I-10 to drive into Palm Springs. For five dollars, the woman bought a map of the stars’ homes. They drove past Frank Sinatra’s Twin Palms, which you could rent for $2,600 a night, and the honeymoon house of Elvis and Priscilla Presley on Ladera Circle, and Marilyn Monroe’s house. The Palm Springs Tram was closed for repairs or they would have taken it to the top of San Jacinto. The boy got a souvenir, though—a Palm Springs traveling cup.
He had quite an accumulation of souvenirs from their travels, mostly cheap things. In Indio, he insisted they stop at a roadside stand for a bag of dates. Not to eat, but to add to his stash.
“When we dump the car,” the woman said, “you can’t take all this stuff with you.”
The boy shrugged. He knew better than most that life was a transient proposition.
The boy was twelve going on twenty. Quiet. He kept his feelings to himself. But the woman knew that behind the subdued facade was a land mine waiting to explode. You just needed the right thing to trigger it.
He wanted.
The woman knew what he wanted, and she would have liked to give it to him, but this was serious business. The job came first.
He was lucky she was taking him at all.
Chapter Two
WELL INTO THE second hour of Max Conroy’s incarceration, the arresting officer came to release him from this stinking hellhole. About time.
From the outside, the courthouse in Paradox, Arizona, was nineteenth-century ornate, but that didn’t fool anybody. The inside was moldering, cramped, and oven-hot. It smelled of urine, alcohol, and BO. His cell mate hadn’t moved in the two and a half hours Max had been in here; he just lay on the one bunk with his face to the wall, snoring like a gas generator.
The alcohol fumes were getting to him. He couldn’t stand the stench. Sometimes his mind would drift—this had happened a lot in the last couple of weeks—and when he came back into his body he imagined he could smell it on himself.
But he was clean. Alcohol and drug free.
Reborn.
A couple of hours later, the deputy who arrested him unlocked the cell door. Her nameplate said “Tess McCrae.” Tan uniform, twenty pounds of leather and weaponry girding her hips and ruining what was probably a nice line. She had good posture, though. Squared away, no nonsense. Efficient too, the way she’d had him handcuffed and shoved up against her sheriff’s cruiser in one fluid motion.
She led him through intake, which was also output, just a shabby corner hidden from view by a flimsy partition. The whole inside of the third floor of the courthouse was like a stage set. Even the guard by the door seemed like a cardboard cutout—adding to the unreality that floated around Max most of the time now.
She returned his possessions, including his belt and shoelaces, which had been taken in case he’d gotten it in his mind to hang himself. He waited for her to say something. You’d think, in this backwater, not having ID would be a capital crime—maybe even a hanging offense. But she didn’t bring it up.
“That it?” he asked. “I’m free to go?”
She nodded.
He gave her his best Max-as-charming-con-man voice. “What did I do? Officially.”
She looked at him sideways through calm, hazel eyes. “You loitered.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s on the books. You can look it up.”
Loitering was as good a trumped-up charge as any, Max guessed. He was grateful to her for saving him from the two guys in the limo, even if it meant spending a couple of hours in the pokey.
Who knew what they were after? If it hadn’t been for the deputy’s resourcefulness, he might have been a rotting corpse in the middle of the desert by now.
Although more likely, he’d be on a jet headed back for LA.
Tess McCrae walked him down the stairs and out through the echoing, empty first floor to the double wooden doors. The door screeched as it scuffed over the sill. Sunlight spotlighted him. He blinked and realized again that although he didn’t have a hangover, it sure felt like one.
Outside, the street looked like someone had run an iron over it. His heart sped up for a moment or two, then slowed back to its normal pace when he saw there were no suits in a black stretch limo. In fact, nobody at all.
They could be around the corner, watching and waiting.
The unreality of it was dizzying. For a moment, his thoughts started to fly away again, and he pictured himself holding the M-1 rifle, the one in Man Down, how he’d liked the heavy feel of it cradled in his hands, liked the shooting, the casings pinging around him. He pictured holding a pistol muzzle to his head, those many times he’d wished hard for the percussive sound that would obliterate it all.
But now, he marveled, those thoughts had lost their potency. Realized he just thought them out of habit.
“I’m free,” he said.
She looked at him. “Of course you’re free. I said you were.”
He stepped outside, getting his sea legs. The sun bearing down, blinding, he could swear he smelled alcohol—he’d been pickled in it for so long—and the smell of sex with countless women he didn’t know, and the dry mouth and seizing heartbeat from the prescription drugs. Sweat beaded under his hair. “You know a good place for lunch?”
“I know a place for lunch,” she said. “But it isn’t good. Nothing’s good around here.”
“The diner?”
She nodded again. That straight spine. No leeway there for all the silly stuff most people did with their hands and expressions and body language when they realized who he was.
Then she spoiled it. “I’ll go with you.”
“Why? You said I was free to go.”
“I’m hungry. How’s that?”
THE DINER HAD a western theme, like everything in the town. Old movie posters on the walls, bustling waitresses with raccoon eyes and beauty-shop hairdos, clicking down the plastic plates and banging the ceramic coffee mugs. The deputy caught the door he held out for her. He could feel her calm presence even though they weren’t touching. He wondered if he’d been mistaken—that maybe she didn’t know who he was. The beard helped. He’d been living in these clothes since yesterday morning, and with the hundred-degree heat and the hitchhiking and the rainstorms he knew he was pretty ripe. During his two weeks at the Desert Oasis Healing Center, he’d learned the hard way that the hippie deodorant they provided didn’t work for shit.
The waitress didn’t make eye contact with him. Amazing how that worked. Nobody saw the homeless.
She sat them by the window away from everyone else. Fine by him. He could look at the street. He caught the deputy noting that. The deputy noted everything. After the waitress left with their order, the deputy leaned forward, setting her hands palms-down on the paper place mat. She wore clear polish and her trimmed nails were little half-moons. Her gaze was so steady it made him want to look away.
“So,” she said. “Who’s after you?”
“No one’s after me.”
“Those guys in the limo—why did they want you to go with them?”
“Beats me.”
She said nothing, just continued to watch him. No recognition in her eyes, though. Her face didn’t betray her real feelings about him, if there were any.
The silence was oppressive. He felt he had to say something. “What’s it to you?”
“Frankly, I don’t see why they’d want to get their car dirty.”
He gave her his most winning smile. “I can’t explain it.”
“You can’t.”
“Nope.” He added, “Maybe they were aliens come down to abduct me.”
She stared into his eyes, searching. Her half-moon nails solidly on the place mat.
Max realized he liked her.
She tapped her fingers on the place mat. “I guess it’s your business,” she said.
The diner was beginning to fill up—starting to get noisy.
A short, stocky man came in and approached their booth. The man wore a knit polo shirt and jeans and a lanyard around his neck. “Push over, doll,” the man said to the deputy, sliding into the booth next to her. He thumped union-boss elbows on the counter and leveled his gaze at Max. “Who’re you?”
“Who are you?”
“I asked first.”
The deputy said, “This is Pat. He’s Bajada County’s one and only detective, so don’t make him mad.”
“No kidding.” Pat lifted the paper place mat up close to his face and studied the menu printed on it. “Tess, you know if they got peekin’ pie today?”
“Think so,” the deputy said.
“So who is this guy?” Pat asked.
“Says his name is Dave.”
“Dave?” Pat looked up, his blue eyes startled in his pink Irish face. Something changed in his expression, but he hid it well.
The waitress took their orders, standing upwind and doing her best to ignore Max.
After the waitress left, Pat leaned forward on his stout elbows. “So, Dave. What’s a genuine, honest-to-God, bleeding-heart, liberal
movie star like you doing in this piss-water town?”
“You’re mistaking me for someone else.”
“Uh-huh. Tess, you ever see this guy’s movies?”
“Some of them.”
“What was the first one you saw?”
“The Slab.”
Pat leaned forward. “When was that?”
Tess sighed. “June twenty-second, two thousand nine.”
“And that was…”
“A Monday.”
“You sure, now? How do you know it was a Monday?”
“It just was.”
Pat settled in deeper in the booth and stared at her avidly. “Anything special about that day?”
Tess looked at Max. “Two Metro trains in Washington, DC, collided.”
“Oh?” Pat leaned forward, cupped his chin in his hands, sang, “Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.”
Tess held Max’s gaze. Those calm hazel eyes. “Nine people died.”
“Anything else?”
“Eighty people were injured.”
“Do tell. Where was this?”
“Tahoma Station.”
The waitress came over with their food. “You playin’ that game again, Pat? I’m sure this girl is tired of bein’ your one-trick pony.”
Max said to Tess, “Someone you knew died in the wreck?”
“Permit me,” Pat said to the deputy, then turned to Max. “She didn’t know any of them. As a matter of fact, I doubt she even knew there was a Tahoma station.”
A loud beep emanated from Pat’s belt. He shifted away from them and called in, his voice low. Closed his battered flip phone and looked at the deputy. “We gotta go. Somebody fighting over a goat—I kid you not. Knowing those two mean-ass lesbians, it could turn into a homo-cide for sure.”
Deputy McCrae was already on her feet.
Pat stood up, guzzled the rest of his coffee, and tossed a few bills on the table. “See you around, Max.”
Chapter Three
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