Blood Ties

by Sigmund Brouwer

  She fought the impulse to look upward and managed to keep her hands in the soapy water.

  “Kelsie, my love, I want to give you notice that I will be appearing soon. This will give you time to prepare yourself for me. A long, hot bubble bath would be appropriate. And. you have probably noticed the selection of perfumes among your toiletries. I prefer the Escape from Calvin Klein, but you, of course, may have different tastes.”

  Unhurriedly, although adrenaline was making her shaky, she pulled her hands from the sink and wiped them on a towel.

  She turned, looking for Taylor. He had moved into the kitchen behind her and was peering upward, trying to find the source of the unfamiliar sound.

  “Oh, yes,” the voice said. “Your son. I will make suitable arrangements for him during our time together. After all, you and I will need our privacy.”

  Kelsie thought of not replying to the voice. She realized, however, that whoever had put her in this room had almost complete control. She would have to reply sooner or later. Then another realization struck her. Whoever was speaking knew that Taylor had just moved into the kitchen.

  A video camera?

  She took Taylor by the hand and led him into the living room. The voice followed her there with an audible click as it transferred from the kitchen speaker.

  “Go ahead, my love, sit on the couch. Make yourself comfortable.”

  Again, she refused to look upward. Her guess was that the observation lenses were hidden behind the plastic covers that protected the light bulbs.

  Inwardly, she shuddered at the new knowledge. Everything she did – and perhaps had done since arriving – was in plain sight of her stalker.

  She remained standing.

  “Speak to me, my love,” the voice said. “Don’t you find relief after all these years that we can communicate?”

  “Why?” she said. The anguish came from all those years of terror, anguish she couldn’t hide, no matter how calm she wanted to appear to be. “Why me?”

  “If I could have asked you to marry me,” the voice said, “I would have. Long ago. I would have courted you and won you. I am much better for you than the others.”

  “The others you killed.”

  “I knew how good it would be, you and I together. I couldn’t let them stop it. You will understand when you love me in return.”

  “You are holding me prisoner,” Kelsie said. Was there some way she could get into his mind? “I don’t think that shows love.”

  “Oh, but it does. I have loved you a long, long time. And now, you will be able to return my love for a long, long time. Don’t consider this a prison but a home.”

  “No.” The strength in Kelsie’s voice surprised her. Defiance, however, was one of her few choices. “You are a monster.”

  “You will see differently. And even if you don’t, you will be wise to pretend. For I hold your life.”

  “But not my soul or my will. You are a monster. Every waking moment in this prison I will show you how much I hate you.”

  “Actually, my love, in less than an hour, you will do just the opposite.”

  “There is nothing you can do to me to make me submit. I will die before I let you touch me.” She meant it. Twenty-three years under his control had been enough.

  “I don’t think so,” the voice said. “Taylor is not here because I love him too.”

  Unconsciously, she hugged her son tighter.

  “You see, my love, you will have a choice. Give yourself to me or lose your son. And I promise, you will watch him die slowly and terribly over many weeks, perhaps months. I have had practice at the art of torture.”

  The voice stopped, giving her a chance to understand.

  “On the other hand,” the voice began again, “for as long as you continue to please me as my wife, he will remain safe and healthy.”

  Another pause. “You have an hour to think this over.”

  3:45 p.m.

  “So this is Lake Havasu City,” Brody said, stepping onto the runway. Jet turbines wound down to silence behind him. “I hear they moved the entire London Bridge here. Remember, where I was pointing out that island as we carne down? The bridge connects it to the town. Some guy – McCullough, you know, McCullough as in McCullough chain saws – dredged the channel to make it an island then bought the London Bridge. He started the town from scratch, right here in the middle of the desert.”

  “Yeah,” Clay said. He was deep in his own thoughts, hardly knowing what he’d just agreed to, hardly aware Brody had pointed out anything from the air.

  As they approached, they had seen brown folded ridges of desert mountains and endless sand and brush of the valley flats. Sparkling deep, deep impossible blue among the arid pastels was the Colorado River, which widened to a lake because of a dam some thirty miles downstream.

  From the air, the layout of Lake Havasu City was easier to read than a map. The airport was located a few miles north of the town on a two-lane highway that ran from the hills north and continued south and out of sight into the shimmering distance. The town with its thirty thousand residents sprawled over the western slopes of a small mountain range, overlooking the water and mountains that rose desolate on the other side of the lake.

  Garner and Brody headed toward the airport terminal building. Neither carried luggage. Either Clay had guessed right, or he hadn’t. They’d find out within the hour. There was no need to stay overnight.

  “This is nuts,” Brody said. “Absolutely nuts.”

  “It can’t be all that nuts,” Clay said. “You made the call here yourself. You know McNeill has made this his base. All we can do is try to track him from here.”

  “I’m not second-guessing that. I mean it’s your money on the jet charter. What I’m talking about is nuts is this heat. I’ll bet it’s over a hundred degrees.”

  Clay’s mind was on how he wanted to break into a run across the sticky, soft asphalt. If he needed a reminder of the urgency, all he had to do was recall the photograph of a blonde woman and the gloved hand and the fillet knife. He and Brody were measuring time in minutes. Kelsie might be measuring heartbeats as stretches of tortured eternity.

  On the surface, flying to Lake Havasu City might have seemed like a gamble. It wasn’t. They had nothing else to bet on. With no hesitation, Clay had agreed to pay the thousands of dollars to hire, on little notice, a corporate jet out of Kalispell, slashing an eighteen-hour drive to well under three hours of airtime. Clay had tried to use the airtime to nap. He’d had little sleep the previous two nights, and events were beginning to blur.

  “Maybe it’s a great place to spend the winter,” Brody was saying, “but you got to wonder about the summers. Could you imagine some old couple moving down here from Michigan, retiring in a mobile home, and having to live through this kind of heat? I mean –”

  “Brady.” Clay said it with a weary tinge that the sheriff understood immediately.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Some cops get quiet when they’re closing in. Others are talkers. Me, I’m a talker.”

  * * *

  “Take a look again,” Clay said to the fuel attendant. Clay held a photo of Michael McNeill, enlarged from the newspaper article on his whitewater-rafting death. “He might have been wearing a wig or a mustache. Look at his eyes. Nobody can disguise their eyes.”

  The fuel attendant leaned over the photograph. He hadn’t stopped wiping his hands on a greasy rag from his back pocket since stepping into the airport manager’s office. He probably didn’t feel comfortable on the clean carpet, Clay thought, not in dirty coveralls.

  “Ain’t never seen him before.” He frowned, a movement that wrinkled his freckled, bald skull. “How many times does a feller have to tell you? And in an airport this small, I see most everybody.”

  “It confirms what I pointed out, Mr. Garner,” Charles Teebolt said in sanctimonious terms. Since they’d paged the fuel attendant to join them, the airport manager, tall and slight with a puffy blond toupee, had not stopped glancing
down at the fuel attendant’s dirty work boots on the carpet. “That is not the Michael McNeill who signs in and out for that particular aircraft. Are you quite satisfied? May this worker get back to his duties?”

  Brody was outside. He’d spotted a coffee machine and a tray of doughnuts at a quarter apiece. Not that his absence mattered to the lack of progress in the office, Clay thought.

  Clay left the photograph on the manager’s desk. Picking it up would have been like giving up territory, and Clay wasn't ready to quit. He had nothing else to hang on to.

  “We called from Kalispell,” Clay persisted. “Before we left, you confirmed numerous flights into this airport by a Michael McNeill.”

  “Yes, yes,” the manager said. With hand gestures, he was shooing the fuel attendant out of his office. “We keep impeccable records. I assured you of that over the telephone.”

  The fuel attendant seemed relieved to step away.

  “You told us he flew a Cessna Citation,” Clay confirmed, hoping for anything to clear this up. Impossible that both men had never seen Michael before. Was he that good at disguise? “Registration N00925J.”

  “Yes, yes. A Cessna Citation registration N00925J,” the manager said. He smirked. “I simply don’t make errors. Perhaps if you would have faxed me this photograph I could have saved both of us some time and trouble.”

  Clay slammed his fist on the desk in frustration, taking little satisfaction that the smaller man jumped.

  “What is it, Hughie?” Charles made up for his fright by snarling at the fuel attendant, who was shuffling back inside the office. “I thought we were finished with you.”

  “But –”

  “Move along,” Charles told Hughie. “You know what they say about time and money.”

  Hughie shifted his weight from foot to foot. “It’s about that Cessna.”

  Hughie turned to Clay. “See, I don’t forget a plane. That feller you showed me, he don’t fly that plane. I know that for sure.”

  Clay drew a breath and tried to speak slowly. “Another man flies it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you all along,” Hughie said, actually stamping a foot with impatience.

  “Would either of you recognize his face if you saw it?” Clay wanted to shake the man to get an answer more quickly.

  Hughie shrugged. Charlie rolled his eyes as if Clay were a moron.

  “What kind of car does he drive?” Clay asked the fuel attendant.

  Hughie shrugged again.

  Clay thought of Sonny Cutknife. “Is the pilot Native American?”

  “You mean an Indian?”

  Clay nodded, accepting the implied reprimand for political correctness.

  “Nope,” Hughie said.

  Hours earlier, Clay had believed he knew who, and only needed to find where. Now he was certain he was in the right area but was back to the beginning on who. The most frustrating thing was that Michael McNeill was the perfect fit. Everything pointed to him, from the fingerprints on the corkscrew that had killed Doris, to his accessibility to the family. A faked death was the perfect way to disappear.

  “Are you finished yet?” Charles asked. “I do wish to send this man back to work.”

  Clay was thinking maybe they could get Hughie and Charles to work with an artist and come up with a composite sketch. If they came up with a sketch and if they showed it around enough, they might come up with a name. They didn’t have time, though, let alone the manpower. Something like this could take a day, two days of concentrated help from the local cops. And the whole reason he and Brody had flown in was to keep the local cops from getting involved.

  “I said, are you finished?” Charles snapped. “I would –”

  “Quiet,” Clay commanded.

  Hughie grinned, caught Charlie noticing, swallowed the grin, and quickly left the office.

  Clay wanted to bang the desk again. Better yet, he wanted to hit the smug man and stop his whining superiority. Something was bugging Clay, something that had just crossed his mind.

  Michael McNeill was the perfect fit. But if he wasn’t the Watcher, that meant that from the beginning, someone had taken great pains to set him up.

  If Clay could come up with the photograph of that someone, it would save all the trouble and uncertainty of a composite sketch. They could start here at the airport by showing the photograph around.

  “If you don’t mind, I do have my paperwork.” The little man was actually ready to push Clay out of the office.

  Michael McNeill was the perfect fit. Too perfect?

  Clay ignored the man. Instead, he reached over the desk and grabbed the telephone. “What’s your fax number here?” he asked as he was dialing a number in Kalispell.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  Clay pressed the phone to his ear and listened to it ring, but continued to speak to Charlie. “Fax number. You said I should have faxed you a photograph ahead of time. Well, I’m about to have it sent.”

  * * *

  In the airport restaurant, Clay got lucky on his second hit. Brody was out in the heat, moving around the airport runways with his copy of the faxed photo, talking to employees and asking the same question Clay was.

  “See him before?” Clay asked.

  “A few times,” the tiny waitress said, squinting at the photograph. She was wizened, an elf in an apron.

  Clay felt the hunter’s surge of adrenaline, the excitement of a hunch well-played. “Anything you can tell me about him?”

  “About Mr. Wilkens?”

  “You know his name?” Clay’s intensity nearly drove the waitress behind the counter.

  “Mr. Wilkens,” she repeated. “One day, he left his wallet behind. I was looking in it – to see who it belonged to, not ’cause I wanted to take anything. But for all the yelling Mr. Wilkens did, you’d think he didn’t believe me.”

  “First name?” Clay asked, not daring to hope. Wilkens was enough. It was much, much more than a composite sketch.

  “Thomas,” she said. “Thomas Wilkens. That was the name on his credit cards and driver’s license. Does that help?”

  Clay was already running toward a pay phone to call the Bureau. A false I.D. to the point of credit cards and driver’s license meant there was a good chance he used the same name in that area.

  With the right kind of help, it would not be difficult to find if someone by the name of Thomas Wilkens lived nearby.

  4:30 p.m.

  “Have you decided?” the computerlike voice asked over the speaker.

  It had never been a decision for Kelsie. Even before, when she wanted to be a caretaker, not a mother, she would have seen herself dead before letting anything happen to Taylor. Before, however, her motivation would have been guilt, not the love she’d found.

  “Let him live,” Kelsie said

  “Good. We will be a wonderful family.”

  She might surrender for now, Kelsie knew, but she was going to kill this man. Somehow, sometime, she was going to kill him. She had the garrote hidden under her pillow. Even if it took days, weeks, or months of pretended love to have him relax his guard, she would find a way to strangle him. Those thoughts gave her the strength and hope to endure the unendurable. Whatever he did to her, she would survive. And Taylor would survive.

  “There is the door near your bed,” the voice said. “Stand well back. When it opens, send Taylor outside."

  It seemed her heart stumbled. “Outside? But you said he’d be safe.”

  "Yes, my love, he will be safe. I have never broken a promise to you. You know that. From the beginning, every letter I’ve sent to you, I’ve fulfilled.”

  “Then why take him away from me?”

  “You, my love. I want your wholehearted devotion. Taylor will remain outside. I have a special vest for your son. One with explosives set on a timer. When we have spent our time together, he will be allowed to return. If anything should happen to me, he will die. It is that simple. All that work on that garro
te of yours was admirable but wasted. Remember, I have been watching you. I know everything.”

  Kelsie trembled. Her thoughts of defiance seemed like brittle grass in a wind. “How do I know you won't just kill him?” she asked.

  “Kelsie, my love. Don’t you understand? Just as you must keep me happy, so I must keep you happy. Taylor will live. For that way, I may return again and again and again."

  4:32 p.m.

  Within twenty minutes of Clay’s call, he had the address of Thomas Wilkens. For all the Bureau’s faults, when necessary it could pour on manpower, which it’s agents had done with phone calls and their considerable authorization, discreetly checking with local utility records, phone records, state motor-vehicle records. All of it had pointed very conclusively to a man named Thomas Wilkens living at 289 Desert Quail.

  Clay immediately rented a car. He drove, and Brody read the map. The house at 289 Desert Quail was on a cul-de-sac backing onto a golf course. Clay guessed it was a quiet, exclusive neighborhood.

  The drive into town from the airport took them through a light industrial area, with scattered pods of mobile homes visible from the highway. Closer to the town center, the scenery became commercial – restaurants, hotels, gas stations.

  Clay turned left, up into the hills on a main street named for the town’s founder. They passed shopping malls with clean parking lots and hesitant old drivers. Higher up, the area became seriously residential – houses with graveled front yards instead of lawns, cactus instead of rose bushes.

  “You understand,” Clay said, breaking five minutes of silence, “I’ll be taking the legal heat. If you go in without a warrant, you lose your career even if he is our man, even if Kelsie’s in there.”

  Brody nodded.

  That was the reason Clay didn’t want local law involved; there was too much procedure. All Clay wanted was Kelsie and Taylor safe – if they were still alive – and the best way to keep them alive was by acting as quickly as possible. If they were alive, Clay didn’t care what kind of legal mess he created. If they weren’t alive, he’d care even less.