by Jeff Abbott
“I didn’t own an orange phone,” Jane said. “I don’t think I did. Did David?”
Cal shook his head, pale. “No. His cell phone was found in his jeans pocket.” He looked like he was fighting to maintain emotional control, and losing. Jane reached out and took his hand.
“I saw the inventory. An orange phone wasn’t on there.” Jane squeezed Cal’s hand. “Someone took it.”
There was another, unexplained phone at the crash scene. Did that mean they’d had a phone no one knew about, or that someone else had been at the scene and left it there? “Did you see this orange phone again?”
Brenda shook her head. “My focus was entirely on saving you and getting you treated.”
“Thank you,” Jane said. “David didn’t suffer, did he?” She glanced at Cal; his eyes were closed. She had asked James Marcolin the same question. She couldn’t bear the thought of him suffering.
“No, he didn’t. He was unconscious. It was over very quickly.”
“Excuse me.” Cal got up and went out farther into the yard, breathing heavily.
“I know that’s upsetting,” Brenda said. “Once the boy passed, I started to help with you. I wasn’t even sure you would live. I’m glad you did.”
Jane found her voice: “The witness…Mr. Marcolin, who called the police and the ambulance? Did you talk to him?”
“I wouldn’t have. He would have spoken to the police. So I don’t understand why anyone would want to hurt me or my family now, I was just doing my job.” Her voice went jagged.
Jane lowered her voice. “There was no other sign of another witness.”
“No. I think once we all arrived, no one could have stayed hidden on the hillside. Wait. When we turned onto High Oaks, we were coming from the north, so we turned in at the entrance that was farthest from the crash. There’s a stop sign there, and another car was stopped. It pulled off as we pulled in. I remember it now.”
“What kind of car?”
She closed her eyes, willing to remember, and Jane wondered what that was like, to be able to summon any memory on demand. “I’m sorry. I don’t recall. You work so many accidents.”
“But this one, this one you remembered the orange phone, you have to think, Ms. Hobson, please, please. You’re brilliant. You can remember when I can’t.”
She concentrated, and with so much at stake—perhaps catching the arsonist who had nearly killed her child—Brenda Hobson’s eyes opened. “It was a truck. Black, tinted windows. Clean. Not like it got used for working a lot, you know. There was a streetlight and it gleamed on the black paint. I mean, it was dark, so I couldn’t describe it more, but I saw the gleam on it. Shiloh Rooke, the other paramedic, was driving the ambulance, so he was focused on the road and we were just trying to get there. But Shiloh, he said it was a beauty ride.”
A black truck. “And you saw no other cars?”
“No.”
“You mentioned Shiloh. That’s the other paramedic.”
“Shiloh Rooke.” She gave a little shiver. “And he’s crazy. Glad I’m not working with him anymore.”
“Crazy how?”
“Honey, don’t you go talk to him about any accidents. Stay away. He’s very bad news. Our bosses thought he might have been dealing prescription drugs. Every crew member had to keep an eye on him, but no one could ever prove anything.” She frowned. “If anyone burned down his house, Shiloh would hunt them down and set them on fire himself.”
Cal Hall returned to the table. “I’m sorry, I just needed a moment. What’s happening?”
“We’re leaving,” Jane said. “Ms. Hobson, thank you and I’m so sorry. I hope your son is all right.”
“This isn’t good-bye. I want answers. I want whoever did this to pay…”
“I’ll call the lead investigator on your case tomorrow,” Cal said. “Or my lawyer will. We’ll share our info.”
They walked outside.
“What else did she say?” Cal whispered. “I’m sorry, it was hard. I was there soon after the crash, Perri and I both were, and it was awful. I try my hardest not to think about it.”
“She remembered a black truck turning off High Oaks, but it might not mean anything. She said you couldn’t see the wreck from the road, with the headlights out.” She also told him about the other paramedic, and that Brenda had warned her away from him.
“If this is someone who hates me,” Jane said, “they’re just using words against me, but they are actually hurting someone like Brenda, who was an innocent bystander. Why? Why not come after me?”
“Maybe Brenda knows something she doesn’t even know she knows, and she’s a threat to this person. She mentioned the truck. I don’t remember a truck in the report.”
He was right. She didn’t remember one either.
“Let’s head back,” he said. They walked back to the Range Rover.
* * *
“I never encouraged David in his art.” Cal’s voice grew bitter. “I feel bad about that. I should have encouraged him more. But I wanted him to be like me. I wanted to build a venture-fund business where he could work with me side by side and then he could take over. It’s so old-fashioned. It was a mistake. I loved that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, like me, like your dad. I thought art wasn’t the right thing for him to study, but if he wanted to study computers, that would be fine, as long as he got an MBA afterward. You don’t want to just write code forever; you want to run companies.”
She wanted to say maybe you could have just let David be David. But now, it just sounded cruel. So she said nothing.
She texted her mom. Know it’s late, can I stay at the house tonight. I’ll be there in an hour or so. And the answer: Of course, please do.
She dozed the rest of the way home. It was odd to think she could sleep after the long day, but her brain wanted rest and took it.
Suddenly, rising from the mist of dream: headlights, bright in her eyes. Terror. Was she looking at a mirror or straight ahead? She needed to get away from those headlights. She knew it. Life or death. The headlights could not catch her. She opened her eyes and the image faded, like the afterimages of a light flashed in her face. She shivered.
“Are you OK?” Cal asked.
“Yes. I remembered something.”
He glanced at her. “What?” Surprise on his face.
“From the night of the crash. Another car. Behind us. Chasing us. I don’t know.”
Pieces of a puzzle that did not quite fit together. She thought of the jumble: the orange phone, the black truck, the headlights that she had to escape. Then her head and David’s head, close together on a summer porch, drawing teddy bears, her putting the words into the speech bubbles he drew, crayons scattered between them.
24
SO, PERRI THOUGHT, Liv Danger was a secret. A secret that only David and Jane knew.
But someone could say you knew, too, she realized. Someone could accuse you of being her. It’s your computer used to post her rantings. It’s your house with the notebook with the character sketches. She felt cold. Someone was framing her and that someone had to be:
Jane Norton. Who else would know?
It explained so much. If no one knew the character—hidden in a notebook—that only Jane and David had worked on, then Jane was Liv Danger. The amnesia was fake, or this memory had returned. And for some reason she had decided to use David’s creation as her camouflage.
Jane really was crazy. How could she have hacked Perri’s computer? If it wasn’t her or her nutcase mother just finding her hidden key and trespassing in her house, then she’d hacked Perri’s computer. Well, she must know someone. She was friends with that Adam Kessler and he was certainly an oddball, and he had been a computer geek. She went to Adam’s Faceplace page. Yes, the About section listed him as being in the honors Computer Sciences program at St. Mike’s. As far as hacking went, a phone and a laptop and a social-media page weren’t exactly like breaking into a bank or a government agency.
Who else? No one
had gone into the room in months but her, and Cal had moved out and he’d only been in the room with her. Kamala had come over a few times, to say hello, but she hadn’t gone up into David’s room…and there had been no one else.
Her phone rang. “Yes?”
“Perri? It’s Ronnie Gervase.” One of the leading lights of Lakehaven, the woman who’d run a lot of the volunteer programs for the athletic department, a queen of the football moms. She’d been one of the people she’d seen yesterday at the Baconery, who’d offered kind condolences and a hug.
“Hi, Ronnie, how are you?”
“More like how are you?”
“Me? Um, I’m all right…”
“I was just on Faceplace updating our football-moms page and I saw this on your page. This video. You screaming at and assaulting Jane Norton.”
That had not been up there earlier this evening. “Oh. I…I was upset.”
“You hit her, Perri. I mean, I understand that you blame her, but, well, look, I’m not trying to judge you.”
Of course you are. We all are. With every breath, and we lie and we say we aren’t.
“But maybe take down that video,” Ronnie said. “It is not a good look for you.”
“Who posted it? Jane?”
“Someone named Liv Danger. I don’t know her. Is that a real name?”
“Thank you for telling me, Ronnie. I have to go.”
“Perri…”
“Yes?”
“Maybe get some help? You know, we all love you.”
“Yes, Ronnie, I’ll think about that. Thank you again.” She felt like she was thanking her for a blow to the guts.
Her hand trembled as she drank more wine.
She went to the Faceplace page. There it was, under: Jane never paid, did she? Neither did the others. I know how you hate them all, Perri. Isn’t blame an ugly thing?
And then the video, originally shared from the driver’s account where Jane had been tagged and then Perri had been tagged, thirty seconds of awfulness where she acted like a maniac and not the refined, controlled person she had always seen herself to be. And the rideshare driver, narrating for the audience: This lady attacked my fare, dragged her out of the car, hit her, pushed her, and I guess that is her son’s grave and she’s upset, but damn, lady, this is not the answer.
Then the comments, over thirty of them: Perri, call me. Perri, are you all right, I’m worried about you. Did she hit her hard enough for assault charges? Perri, I know a good lawyer.
And then in the midst of the concern and judgment, a comment from Liv Danger: Don’t delete this video from this page, Perri, or I’ll post worse. I know what you did that night.
What did that mean? It couldn’t mean anything. There was nothing worse. She swallowed, her throat feeling like stone. She hadn’t done anything wrong that night…except not hunt for her son. Not go out looking for him when her instincts told her he was lying to her about his whereabouts. But the message made her inaction sound far worse. She had said as much in Vasquez’s articles: that she wished she’d gone out looking for David. Perhaps he would still be alive if she had. The thought wrenched her.
If she unfriended the stalker…she couldn’t post anything more to the page, right? She hesitated.
I’ll post worse.
She should call the police. And they would do what? Nothing.
She left the video up and wrote in a comment: Whoever you are, you’re not a well person to post this. I’m sorry I lost my temper, but my son’s headstone had been defaced and I was deeply upset. It bothered me that the girl who is responsible for my son’s death came to his grave. I apologize for losing my composure. If you have any decency, you’ll take this down and leave me alone.
She got up and paced. The front porch light at the Nortons’ was on. She stood, watched to see if Laurel came out. Perhaps she was expecting someone.
She couldn’t sleep, her mind racing. She tried Cal; he wasn’t answering his phone. Maybe he was off with the girlfriend who smelled of lavender.
So she sat in the front dining room she didn’t use that often—David used to spread out his projects on the dining room table—and drank a book-club glass of wine and watched the empty street. And waited.
I know what you did that night.
A car entered the cul-de-sac. She tensed, but then realized as it headed under a streetlight that it was Cal’s Range Rover. Relief swept over her. It didn’t even matter he was coming here so late at night. She’d talk to him about Laurel, her online conversation with Liv Danger, her awful discovery, the cruel video. The car aimed for her driveway, then pulled slightly to the side. Toward the Norton house. And then the door opened, and in the light she could see Cal at the wheel and Jane Norton getting out of the passenger side.
Perri made a noise in her throat.
This couldn’t be right. No. She watched Jane speak to Cal, illuminated by the car’s inside light, and then Jane closed the door, quietly. Jane walked up to the front door in the wash of headlights—Cal ever so thoughtfully left them on for her—and then she unlocked her door and went inside.
Cal backed out and drove out of the cul-de-sac.
Perri Hall stood at the window for a long while, the oversized wineglass cool against her forehead, but feeling like she had a fever. It couldn’t be what she thought it was. That was madness.
Fine. She would do this alone. Cal had gotten her pregnant. But she alone had pushed David out into the world, and she alone would find justice for him from this crazy girl and her mother. And from whoever was trying to ruin her life.
She went upstairs. She was going to need a good night’s sleep. She went into David’s room. She touched the space bar, waking his iMac from sleep. She refreshed the Faceplace page. There was a new posting from Liv Danger:
It feels awful to be blamed for something, doesn’t it? I know what you did while your son lay dying. All will pay.
It was a lie. She had done nothing. Nothing. She nearly screamed, shoving her fist against her mouth.
25
RANDY FRANKLIN AWOKE to darkness. His mouth tasted metallic—oddly, of copper and silver, as though money had been dragged across his tongue. Where was he? For one awful moment he thought he had gone out drinking, had a blackout after five years of sobriety, and it made his chest hurt with anger and disappointment in himself. But no, he hadn’t gone out drinking. He remembered: Jane Norton had come to his office, and he’d left for the day, calling the temp agency to arrange for a receptionist to come tomorrow, because he wanted layers between him and that girl. Her case, and the others’, had been nothing but trouble for him. He wanted out, and he wondered if she might be his ticket.
Then he’d headed to a junkyard east of Austin, found the wrecked car on his newest case. It was a late-year-model European sedan, driven too fast by an Austin engineer, who had run a red light and T-boned another car, one with an older couple inside. They were both badly injured and were suing the engineer. The engineer claimed he had applied brakes and that they had not been responsive as quickly as they should have been. Franklin’s boss—representing the engineer—had dispatched him to the junkyard, where both cars were interred, to check the so-called black box, that would measure and record the engineer’s car’s data—speed, application of brakes, and so forth—for the last five seconds before the crash. In inspecting the black box, Franklin had “accidentally” erased it. Oh no. How awful. It happened now and then. If at the moment of impact, the car suffered a power failure, then the reserve electricity went to deploying the airbags and didn’t salvage the final seconds of data. Sometimes Randy used a magnet, or if he could restart and move the car for five seconds, the data could be overwritten, depending on the damage. Lawsuits were war. Now it would be easier to blame the automobile manufacturer than it would be the inattentive engineer. This wasn’t uncommon. Franklin worked both sides of accidents; if he had been employed by the lawyer for the plaintiffs, then he would have downloaded the information first to ensure against
such interference from the opposing investigator. Now, if the opposing investigator bothered, he’d find the black box’s data damaged, perhaps from a power failure tied to the crash. No way to prove otherwise, when Randy was careful. Fortune favors the bold.
Had he interfered with the computer systems in the Jane Norton crash? He thought not. Her suicide note was enough to veer a judgment toward his clients.
Then he remembered heading toward his car, and spotting a fat wallet lying on the ground close to it. He’d bent down to pick it up, curious, and then a rush of movement from the other side of his car, then the momentary sting of a needle in his neck. Then a delicious floating nothingness.
He’d been drugged.
The relief that he hadn’t gotten drunk lasted all of three seconds, displaced by bold terror that he had been injected by someone and tied up and left in a coffin-like darkness.
He realized he was gagged, a neat plug wadded into his mouth. He tried to move and he couldn’t, arms cocooned to his chest, legs bound together.
He explored the space with his feet. He was in a car trunk. He could hear the distant sound he recognized with a chill, of metal crushing.
He was still in the junkyard. Hadn’t someone seen him taken and tied up and placed here? It was a huge operation. Wouldn’t there be security cameras?
Data could be erased. He knew that well enough. His chill turned to a feverish flush of panic.
The loud grinding roar that rendered wrecked autos to scrap, sold and recycled, got louder. He’d heard it in the background as he’d fixed the computer readings in the wrecked Euro sedan to his liking. Then it was just background noise. Now it was closer.
He kicked at the trunk. Just to get his captor to open it. He could talk his way out of this. Offer money. Anything could be negotiated. That was all that happened in the aftermath of car crashes. It was all negotiation.
