“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Sabrina. “The guy had a gun, remember?”
“But he also said that they didn’t kill Daisy, and I believe him. I don’t think they are killers. I think they were just trying to intimidate us. However, I’m going to get my gun out of the house, just in case.”
Before anyone could object any further, I jumped out of the car and walked the block to my house. I walked right past the car with the blonde and her friend, not looking at them at all, but I sensed that they ducked down in their seats. I went straight up to my apartment and got my gun, putting it in my pocket this time, not in my pants. It was a little bulky, but I figured it wouldn’t be there long. I was nervous, but not terrified. A lot had happened in the last year and I’d found my confidence level to be spiking.
I went down the stairs, out the door and walked up the street. When I got to their car, I nonchalantly walked over to it, opened the back door, and slid in, pulling my gun out as I did. I’m not sure what I would have done if the door had been locked.
It caught them totally off-guard. I think it was the last thing they expected. I held my gun up so they could see it and said, “Let’s talk.”
“You’re not going to use that,” said the blonde.
“I’m so fucking tired of all this right now,” I said, swearing for emphasis, “you really don’t want to test it. I’ve been nearly murdered at least twice in the last week, and I don’t know that it wasn’t you behind it.”
“It wasn’t,” said the guy.
“Shut up,” said the blonde. He shut up.
“Wow, are you whipped, or what?” I said to the guy. He just gave me a mean look. I continued to both of them. “Yeah, I don’t think you tried to kill me, but you’re involved, so start talking. We’ve already called 911, but they are a little busy right now, so you have a few minutes to tell me what I want to know. If I’m satisfied, I might even let you go. If not, you can explain it to the police. They are already looking for you two.”
“We’re just watching you,” said the blonde, “and reporting back.”
“To whom?”
“None of your business.”
“It’s exactly my business. Right now, you two are the number one suspects for trying to blow us away on the highway in Texas and on the stairs in my house. Not to mention the murder of Daisy Leduc, whom you so conveniently impersonated.”
They looked at each other in surprise.
“I impersonated her, but we don’t know anything about any of the other things,” said the blonde. I believed her.
“Then tell me why you are watching me and why you stole the contents of the safe deposit box.
“Because that’s what they pay us for.”
“You’re pissing me off. You do realize that you impersonated Daisy just days after she was killed. That means that either you killed her or you were aware of her death.”
“We knew she had died. Like I said, we had nothing to do with her death.”
“You can tell that to the cops. I’m sure they’ll believe you.”
“We’re working for Lucas Holt,” said the guy. The blonde gave him a look, but it didn’t have as much venom as I thought it would. I think she was about to give up the information herself.
“We don’t know anything about the murder,” said the blonde. “We knew she was dead, but we didn’t hear that she was murdered until later. Our job has been simple, to watch you and the woman and report back. We don’t know what was in the box, and we don’t know anything about murder attempts on you.”
“Well then, you’re not watching very carefully.”
She looked embarrassed. “We lose you from time to time.”
“This has been most interesting,” I said, “but I think I’d rather have you talk to the police.”
The parking spot in front of us had just opened up a minute before. At the word “police,” the blonde stepped on the gas and peeled out from our spot, almost hitting an oncoming car head-on in the narrow city street. As she did that, the guy jumped between the seats and grabbed hold of my gun hand, pointing the gun toward the floor. We struggled and he freed up a hand and took a swipe at me, his fist glancing off my forehead. It hurt, but it didn’t stop me from fighting him for the gun. My right hand got free and I punched him in the face, breaking his nose. Blood flowed all over his suit.
Meanwhile, the blonde wasn’t exactly speeding, but she was weaving in and out of traffic. She was actually a pretty good driver. If I had tried that, I would have plowed into something in the first ten seconds. Every time we’d turn a corner, suit-guy and I would roll with the turn, still hanging onto each other for control of the gun.
The fight and the wild ride lasted a few minutes, until the blonde’s route took us to Revere Beach. She made a left to take us down along the beach, but she didn’t make the turn, instead crashing into a retaining wall that protected the road from the beach. I was momentarily stunned, as I hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt. Who knew we were going anywhere?
I heard the front doors open and I looked up to see the two of them fleeing the car. A minute later, Sabrina and Mo were there, pulling me out of the car. I didn’t sense the urgency until I realized that the car was on fire. Mo was yelling at bystanders to get away. They got me behind Mo’s car just as the fire reached the leaking gas of the other car. The car burst into flames.
I was breathing heavily, once again having come close to death.
“Bet the cops show up now,” I said.
Chapter 16
Okay, so that didn’t go so well.
We spent a while with the cops, trying to explain what had happened. I thought I had left my gun in the car, but Mo said she had picked it up. It was now safely hidden in her car.
Eventually, Detective Marsh showed up. Technically this wasn’t a homicide, but because it involved us, he figured that a homicide had to be involved in some way, so he joined the investigation. I told him that I saw them and decided to talk to them. I made no mention of the gun. I mentioned them saying that they worked for Lucas Holt and that the blonde then took off on our jaunt. I also told him that I had left him a message and that we had tried calling 911.
He finally let us go.
Mo dropped us off at the house, but said she had some errands to run and took off after we had thanked her.
“Any suggestions?” I asked Sabrina when we were finally alone in the apartment.
“You mean other than dropping the whole thing?”
“Didn’t think about that. I suppose that’s a possibility, too.”
“No it isn’t,” Sabrina said. “You know as well as I do that we can’t drop it now. We’d always wonder whether, if we’d stuck with it, we would have found the answer.”
“Plus,” I said, “Someone is gunning for us. They might not believe that we’ve dropped it. So yes, other than dropping the whole thing.”
“Well, I was thinking about that. I’d like to go back and look at the yearbook. It’s a longshot, but I want to see if there is any picture of Daisy—Lucinda, really—with someone else. She had to have a friend. We only looked at her individual yearbook picture. We didn’t go through the whole yearbook. Sometimes long shots pay off.”
Hey, it was something to do.
We locked ourselves in the apartment that night and I kept my gun right next to the bed. Not that I was paranoid or anything. The next morning we were once again on our way to Harvard. Out of a newborn habit, I kept checking the rearview mirror.
“Blonde girl isn’t behind us,” said Sabrina. “She’s probably not even in the city.”
“I’m not worried about her. I believe her. I don’t think she’s the one who has been trying to kill us. There’s someone else involved in this, and since we don’t know what he, or she, looks like, that’s what scares me.”
We arrived at the library and parked in a highly visible spot. I put my gun in my belt under my shirt. I noticed that Sabrina didn’t object.
In just a few mi
nutes, we were back in the reference room with the yearbook open in front of us. This time, we were going through it page by page.
It’s bad enough going back through your own yearbook years later. Some people look familiar and some don’t. Some you liked and some you didn’t. In general, it’s pretty much of a bore. Going through someone else’s yearbook is sheer hell. It’s like the guy at work who wants to show you endless pictures of his kids. Who cares? But we slogged our way through it, one page at a time. A couple of times we thought we’d found her, but so many of the girls looked the same and on further scrutiny none of them were Daisy/Lucinda. But about a million pages later, Sabrina’s long shot paid off. There, on page 292 (okay, I lied about the million pages) was a clear picture of Lucinda with her arm around the shoulder of another girl. They were at some sort of cookout. The event wasn’t labeled, but that didn’t matter, we now had another face.
I took a picture of the photo with my cell phone, so we would have something to hold up to the individual pictures in the yearbook as we flipped through. However, just to be thorough, we continued looking at the pictures, just in case there was a second one with Lucinda. In fact, there was. She had her arm around the same girl, this time at a teacher/student softball game.
We had to find this girl.
We then worked our way through the individual pictures of the graduates. We almost thought we had struck out when we found her at the very end. Karen Yardley. She couldn’t have had a name at the beginning of the alphabet. No, that would have been too simple.
“Definitely her,” said Sabrina.
“Absolutely. Now we have to find her.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard.” Sabrina opened up her laptop.
It took her about ten minutes.
“Karen Yardley is now Karen Ackerman.”
Now she gets a name at the beginning of the alphabet.
“And the good news,” continued Sabrina. “is that she lives in Massachusetts. Falmouth, on Cape Cod. Is that far from here?”
“A lot closer than Pennsylvania. A little more than an hour from here.”
“There’s a phone number listed. If she can see us today, do you want to go?”
Sabrina could’ve asked me if I wanted to go to Hell with her and I’d have packed my sunscreen and my toothbrush and been ready to go in five minutes.
“Sure.”
We put the yearbook back on the shelf, packed up the laptop, and headed back to the car. I looked around the parking lot, but saw nothing suspicious. When we were safely ensconced in the car, Sabrina made the call. We had decided that it was an appropriate time for her to use her fame.
“Mrs. Ackerman? My name is Sabrina Spencer. I’m a writer… Yes, that writer… No, this isn’t a joke. I’m doing some research for a book and I was wondering if you’d have some time for me if I came down to talk to you about Lucinda Holt? … Yes, I realize it’s been a long time, but you might be able to fill in some blanks about her life in college… If you’re available, we could be down there in an hour and a half or so… Thank you. I’m looking forward to meeting you.”
She hung up.
“Done.”
“Cape Cod or bust,” I said, starting the car.
*****
Getting in or out of Boston is never pretty. They spent years on the “Big Dig,” an over-budget, graft-ridden fiasco that supposedly updated the highways, bridges, and tunnels running through Boston. Finished in 2006, it now already seemed out of date. These days it was just one traffic jam after another, even at times of the day when in the past it would have been empty of cars. But we finally made it out and headed to the Cape. Going over the Bourne Bridge, linking the mainland with the Cape, was bittersweet for me. When I was young, before my father got caught screwing one of his students and my parents split up, we had a bungalow near the beach in Falmouth. We’d go down every summer for about a month. It was such an innocent, carefree time for me. And then my parents split up and sold the bungalow. The Cape never had the same feel for me after that and I pretty much avoided going down unless I absolutely had to.
We found Karen’s house pretty easily. It was in the center of Falmouth, on one of the streets that led down to the water. It was a large old house, the kind that you buy and then spend a fortune updating. It looked like Karen and her husband had done a good job. We pulled into the driveway, and once again I looked around before walking up to the front door. I had suddenly become pretty untrusting. This time, though, I left the gun locked in the car.
Karen met us at the door. She couldn’t have been more the opposite of Daisy in appearance. They had been the same age, but from the pictures we’d looked at from the murder scene, courtesy of Detective Moody in Lubbock, and Sabrina’s memory of Daisy in prison, Daisy had let her body go completely. She had gotten old. Karen was quite attractive and looked young for her age. She was obviously in good shape, looking like a runner.
She was trying not to look excited to be meeting a famous author, but she couldn’t pull it off. She ushered us in and offered us coffee, which we declined.
Sabrina started it off.
“I’m Sabrina and this is Del.”
“Are you the one they always refer to as ‘and friend’?”
I liked her already. I was finally recognized.
“That’s me.”
“As I said on the phone,” said Karen, looking back at Sabrina, “it was a long time ago, so I’m not sure how much help I can be. How did you find me?”
Sabrina told her.
“I’m impressed. Funny, I never saw a copy of that yearbook. Lucinda was killed right before graduation and I kind of lost interest in things for a while. I think I had paid for a copy, but I never picked it up. So we were together in a couple of pictures?”
I showed her the pictures on my phone.
“Wow. That’s a blast from the past. It’s a time of my life that I had relegated to the deep recesses of my mind. But ask away and I’ll see if I can help at all. But could you answer a question first?”
We waited.
“Why would something that happened so long ago be of interest to you? Are you writing a book on The Taunting Man?”
“No, the serial killer doesn’t interest me. We’re trying to find out as much about Lucinda’s disappearance as possible,” said Sabrina. She hesitated. “We know that the serial killer took credit for her murder and her body was never found. The reason her body was never found was that she was never killed. She changed her name and moved away. We’re trying to find out why.”
Karen was stunned.
“No. That can’t be.”
“She changed her name to Daisy Leduc. She got married and had a daughter. Her husband was murdered, and she went to prison for twenty years, accused of killing him—a charge we think was trumped up against her. She got out about a year ago and was murdered a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t a random murder.”
She stopped. Karen was crying. We let her cry.
“Why?” she finally asked, drying her eyes.
“We don’t know.”
“Daisy Leduc?”
“Strange, huh?” I asked.
“No.”
“No?”
Karen gave a sad smile. “She had a fascination with Daisy Duck. She would draw pictures of her and she had Daisy Duck sheets. We used to laugh about it. That’s why I know you’re telling the truth. Why didn’t she contact me?”
It took us a second to answer. We were too surprised.
“We don’t think she was able to,” answered Sabrina. “We just don’t know why. We are hoping that something … anything … that you might be able to tell us about the times you spent together will give us a clue.”
“Did you know Lucinda?” asked Karen.
“I did,” said Sabrina. “But I knew her as Daisy.”
“But if she was in prison all those years …” Karen stopped as a realization set in. “You knew her in prison, didn’t you? I read the story about you.”
Sabrin
a nodded. Nothing more needed to be said.
“Lucinda and I were close. We were best friends and roommates the final two years at Harvard. Inseparable.” She gave me a glance as if she could read my mind. Was I really thinking it?
Karen turned red. “We were just best friends who had a lot of fun together.”
“So maybe she opened up to you about her home life?” I asked expectantly.
“Yes and no. I know that she hated her parents—especially her father—and loved her brother, and she would expound on that quite a bit. But as close as we were, there was something she wouldn’t tell me.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I asked her.”
Duh.
“I always felt that there was something missing when she talked about them, especially that last few months. I asked her about it once and she very deliberately shut me down. She said it was better that I didn’t know.”
“You said she loved her brother,” said Sabrina. “Did you ever meet him?”
“I met her parents once. Unpleasant people. Jackson, her brother, I met a number of times. Nice guy. Very gentle. He would visit her a lot. I liked him. Sometimes he would visit Lucinda and we would hang out together—go to bars or music festivals. But she had a falling out with him. The last few weeks she was alive, he didn’t visit and she stopped talking about him. In fact, she stopped talking about her family altogether. I asked her why and she told me it was none of my business. With that comment, I felt her drawing away from me. We didn’t talk much in those last few weeks. We blamed the distance on the fact that we had to study for finals, but we both knew it was more than that. After the last final, she vanished.”
She continued. “In all honesty, while we were best friends for over a year, there was a lot I didn’t know about her. After she died … well, disappeared I guess … I thought a lot about her. It was only then that I realized how screwed up she was. There’s no doubt in my mind that it was her family who damaged her. It was pretty sad.”
“So tell us about her family,” said Sabrina. “Everything you can remember.”
Fatal Lies ( Lies Mystery Thriller Series Book 2) Page 9
