‘What if they’ve already called, know he’s OK?’ Sam asked. ‘More to the point, what if Kez doesn’t want her to come back?’
‘His condition could have changed since they called,’ Grace said. ‘And Cathy wouldn’t accept Kez trying to stop her.’
‘Which could make Kez mad,’ Sam said.
‘We have to do something,’ Grace protested.
‘We are,’ Sam said. ‘I am.’
Grace went back with David to Saul’s room, both in agreement that what they had to do was stay calm around him, give him no cause to suspect the kind of danger Cathy might be in.
Not that tough with Saul sleeping again, mercifully.
This was hardest now, Grace realized, for David.
‘I told Cathy – ’ he had just said to Grace out in the corridor – ‘just a few days back, while we were still in Naples, that I thought Kez was special.’
Special.
Grace had seen the pain in his eyes, had empathized.
She wanted to scream.
One of the things Sam badly wanted to do, he thought, driving west again on I-75 – after he’d got Cathy safely home and put Kez where she belonged – was to put things right between himself and Terri. Even if he did still feel she’d brought their suspicions on herself with her inappropriate approach to cases that had nothing to do with her.
Still, he could call her, had to call her.
‘I want to thank you again,’ he said, ‘for what you’ve brought to us.’
‘Saul brought it to us, like I said.’
She sounded curt and Sam winced, felt that even if she hadn’t realized the extent of their qualms, she’d almost certainly felt a heap of negativity.
‘I also want to tell you, off the record,’ he said, ‘that so far as I’m concerned, right now we’re both on the same team.’
‘Both out of our jurisdiction,’ Terri said.
‘Both wanting the same end,’ Sam said.
‘What do you want, Sam?’
‘I want you to promise me that if you find them first you’ll sit tight, wait for me.’
‘I can’t promise you that,’ Terri said. ‘It’s going to have to depend on what the circumstances are. I’m sure you agree.’
‘Better for everyone if you wait.’
‘Assuming I do find them,’ Terri said, ‘which is pretty unlikely since I don’t have the first idea where they’d be headed – and you’re more likely to find out if Flanagan has people in Naples than I am. ’
‘But just for the heck of it,’ Sam persisted, ‘let’s say you do happen on them . . .’
‘If you still can’t trust me to do the right thing, Detective Becket,’ Terri said, ‘then screw you.’
He swallowed it. Even understood it.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Then at least promise me that if anything happens, you’ll share with me before you decide on any course of action.’
‘So long as you guarantee – ’ she didn’t hesitate – ‘you’ll share everything your contacts give you.’
‘No problem,’ Sam said.
‘You do that,’ Terri said, ‘then I’ll tell you if I find them.’
Back in beautiful, sweet-scented Naples again.
No hospital this time. A residential street lined with houses of charm and character, set well apart.
Spacious. Tranquil.
A little after ten to ten as the Golf slowed to a crawl outside a pale peaches and cream two-storey house with a pretty walled veranda around the whole second floor, clearly divided into sections, the only indication from a distance that the once single dwelling had been converted into apartments.
‘Is this it?’ Cathy asked.
Kez opened the glove box, withdrew a small remote control, drove slowly around the house to a palm sheltered bank of garages, pushed a button, waited for the door of one to open, nosed the Golf inside and switched off the motor. ‘Sanctuary,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-four
‘You should go home,’ David said quietly to Grace, just before ten a.m.
‘I’m fine,’ she told him.
Lying. She was, in fact, more than a little uncomfortable, had been feeling unwell for some time, quite nauseous and shaky and in need of either some gentle exercise or an hour or so of sleep, probably the latter. Except that sleep was out of the question until they knew Cathy was safe and Kez Flanagan was in police custody.
Something else was worrying hell out of her. Sam’s decision not to pass on Saul’s accusation to the Naples police. Not that she hadn’t understood his reasoning – anything that might keep Cathy out of even greater danger was fine with her. But the knowledge that Sam was out there on his own without permission or, more significantly, without back-up, scared her so much she could hardly bear to think about it.
‘Grace, sweetheart,’ David said gently. ‘Worrying isn’t going to change anything, we both know that.’
‘And you’re not worried to death, I suppose?’ Her voice was still hushed, since the last thing she wanted to do was wake Saul.
‘I’m not nearly eight months pregnant,’ David said.
‘I’m a whole lot younger than you are,’ Grace countered.
He smiled, reached over and patted her hand. ‘Old folk need less sleep.’
‘Do you have patients today?’ Grace asked.
‘This afternoon,’ he said. ‘Plenty of time to rest before.’
‘So leave with me now.’
‘In a while,’ he said easily.
‘But if Saul’s going to be sleeping for a long . . .’ She broke off as a new thought struck her. ‘You’re not worried that Kez might come here?’
‘Hardly, since she’s on the way to Naples.’
‘What if she isn’t?’
‘Sam said it was Cathy who told Terri that, remember?’ David smiled again. ‘We have enough real stuff to worry about without inventing more.’
‘You’re right.’ Grace stood up with even more effort than usual.
‘Want me to drive you home, tuck you in?’
The thought was incredibly tempting.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘And if I need anything, Lucia’s around.’
He walked with her to the elevator, told her he was going to stay a little while longer, speak to Lucy Khan when she did her rounds.
‘Then I’ll go home, see if I can dig up any old stuff about Kez and her family.’
‘Maybe I could help you,’ Grace said.
An elevator opened and David pushed her gently inside. ‘Go rest, Mommy.’
‘Please don’t overdo it,’ she said.
The door began to slide shut.
‘You stop worrying,’ David said.
‘I will if you will,’ Grace said.
It was so different.
Pretty furnishings, pastel colours, gorgeous clematis on the veranda – and it struck Cathy when Kez showed it to her that there was something vaguely familiar about it.
‘Almost as if I’d been here before,’ she said.
‘Like a zillion other balconies all over Florida.’ Kez shrugged. ‘All over the world.’
Maybe that was the thing that made Cathy feel so surprised by the whole apartment. Kez had referred to it as her sanctuary, and it was certainly lovely to look at; it possessed a certain tranquillity, which was perhaps why it appealed to her. But Matilda Street was peaceful too, and perfect for Kez – at least, Cathy thought so – with its simplicity and posters and photographs of what mattered to Kez.
This was too . . . pretty.
‘So what do you think?’ Kez asked, back inside the living room.
‘It’s lovely,’ Cathy answered, which was only half a lie, but if she’d told her what she was really thinking, Kez would almost certainly have been hurt.
‘It’s very different,’ she added. ‘To Matilda Street, I mean.’
‘I know,’ Kez said.
‘It could almost,’ Cathy ventured further, ‘belong to another person.’
‘In
a way,’ Kez said, ‘I guess it does.’
That was when Cathy noticed the photograph in a polished wood frame on the end table by the sofa. The only photograph she could see in the whole place.
It was of her, on the track at Trent, one of the shots Kez must have taken that first day just before they’d met.
‘Like it?’ Kez asked.
‘I do,’ Cathy said, touched, and it was a good action photo, the best she’d ever seen of herself, long ponytail streaming, face concentrated, legs pumping.
Kez smiled. ‘Guess it must be my place, after all.’
They went to check out the refrigerator because Kez said she was hungry, but there was nothing inside but a pack of ground coffee, two wrinkly apples and, wrapped in tin foil in one of the salad crispers, some marijuana.
‘Perfect.’ Kez took out the dope.
‘You said you were hungry,’ Cathy reminded her. ‘We could go out.’
‘Uh-uh.’ Kez went ahead of her back into the living room.
‘Or I could go buy something, if you’re tired from the drive.’
‘I’m really not that hungry.’ Kez sat down on the sofa, carefully unfolded the foil, then leaned back and smiled up at Cathy. ‘What I want far more than food is to smoke and talk for a little while.’
Cathy sat down beside her.
‘I’ve been alone a long time,’ Kez said. ‘Had no one to share things with.’
‘I’m here now,’ Cathy said.
‘I’m glad.’
‘Me too,’ Cathy said.
Which was true enough – yet even as she said it she felt a small unease, realized now that she’d felt that way ever since she’d noticed that Kez had stuck the 44 jersey and bat in the black duffel bag she’d brought along from Matilda Street, which had struck Cathy as a little off – though then she’d figured that maybe Kez took them along wherever she travelled because of her dad.
Not off then, at all, just touching.
Except the way Kez had acted on the road was still worrying Cathy a little, and she had believed she was more than OK with this relationship, but if that was true, then why was a part of her wishing she were home right now on the island, with Grace to talk to?
‘Where’s the phone?’ she asked.
‘Don’t have one,’ Kez said.
‘What about your cell phone?’
‘In Matilda Street.’
‘I’ll have to go out soon then,’ Cathy said. ‘Use a payphone.’
‘Sure,’ Kez said easily. ‘No problem.’
At ten fifteen Sam had Terri on the line again, doing his best now to keep her on side by sharing David’s laughter theory with her.
‘I hate to rain on his parade,’ she said, ‘but I came up with that a while back, and if you’d been willing to talk to me about the killings, I’d have told you.’
Sam felt an impulse to tell her that acting like a spoiled kid now, trying to score points, was going to make him even less inclined to talk to her, but right this minute there was no question that he needed Terri, so he bit down the response.
‘So how,’ he asked instead, ‘do you think it might connect to Flanagan?’
‘I only met her one time for about a minute,’ she answered, ‘so I guess I have to throw the ball straight back to you.’
‘Fair enough,’ Sam said.
‘You come up with anything else about her?’
‘Not yet,’ Sam told her, ‘though a friend’s working on it.’
‘Detective Martinez,’ Terri guessed. ‘Off the record, I take it?’
‘You take it right,’ Sam said.
Since arriving back home, Grace had experienced a few cramps.
Stress, she told herself. She was pretty sure the cramps didn’t signify a problem. If she took it easy, maybe did a little breathing, the pains would disappear. She certainly wasn’t going to worry either David or Sam with it, both of them with more than enough to deal with – and what she ought to be doing was going back over her one and only encounter with Kez, in case she’d forgotten even the smallest detail that Sam could use now. The trouble was she was finding it unbearable to think about Cathy with Kez and in danger – and up until this morning it had been Terri she’d been stressing over.
‘Guess I’m not quite myself today,’ Grace said to the dog.
Too much, too much.
Maybe after a sleep . . .
‘People don’t laugh at you much, do they?’ Kez asked Cathy.
It was just after ten thirty, and they were in the pretty sitting room, and she was still smoking, while Cathy was staying with coffee, intent that one of them keep a clear head for the return journey.
‘Sure they do.’
‘So what do you do about it?’
‘Mostly,’ Cathy said, ‘I turn my back on them.’
‘Not me. Not even when I was a little kid. Someone laughed at me, I let them know how I felt about it.’
‘How?’ Cathy asked curiously.
‘All kinds of ways.’ Kez held out the joint to Cathy, shrugged when she shook her head. ‘It’s good stuff.’
‘You shouldn’t smoke so much. It can’t be good for your running.’
‘The cat was the first.’ Kez took another drag and stood up. ‘Way back when I was very young there was this cat used to visit, sit on the window ledge and watch me.’ She walked over to the glass doors and stared out. ‘That day, I was lying on my bed fooling around, touching myself – not masturbating exactly, just playing.’
Cathy sat in silence, wondering where this was going.
‘But this damned cat kept watching me, and it made me think of Alice’s Cheshire cat and the way it grinned.’ Kez turned around. ‘So I got the idea it was laughing at me.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve never forgotten that cat and getting the better of it, wiping the damned grin off its silly face.’
‘How did you do that?’ Cathy’s unease was back, not just because of the strangeness of the tale but because of the way Kez was telling it, as if it were just a regular childhood story.
‘I pushed it,’ Kez answered simply, ‘off the window ledge.’
‘Did you?’ Cathy said, feeling sick.
‘It isn’t true what they say about cats always landing on their feet,’ Kez said. ‘Or about them having nine lives.’
Chapter Twenty-five
By eleven, Terry was getting closer to Naples, listening to her radio, staying off her phone in case Sam called again, and thinking about how she was feeling. Anxious about Cathy, sure, and a little excited, too, contemplating the fact that she might be closing in on the beach killer.
Mostly, though, she was pumped up with rage because of what Kez had done to Saul. The way his family had been around her hadn’t helped her state of mind one bit, but bottom line it was Flanagan’s brutality to the man she loved that had lit Terri’s flame so sky high that it was scaring her a little, because she was not entirely sure what she might do if she was the one to find her first.
When she’d started out on all this, on her personal parallel homicide investigation, it had really just been ambition fuelling her, her need to show everyone what she was capable of. Now it was personal.
And Teresa Suarez, granddaughter of an NYPD street cop, knew enough about police work to realize that was dangerous.
Sam had decided a while back to break his own order, had tried Cathy’s phone, unable to bear not trying it a moment longer, hoping his acting skills were up to playing the game – God forgive him – about Saul’s worsening condition.
Voicemail. Goddamned voice mail.
He’d ended the call, thought about it, then called again and left a convincing enough message: her brother wasn’t doing so well, they hated to drag her back, but they knew she’d want to be there.
And after that, of course, he’d had to call Miami General as Grace had earlier suggested, make sure they knew what to say if either Cathy or Kez called in; and then he’d had to speak to Grace and his dad again, tell them to be sure to check their caller
displays and resist the urge to answer any call from Cathy so she’d think they were at the hospital, just switch to voice-mail and pass on any messages directly to him.
He’d heard nothing new from Martinez, just one useless call to say that Kovac had been on his back all morning and surely it would be smarter and safer to call this in. Sam had told him that no, it would not be safer, and he trusted Martinez not to say a word to anyone, he trusted Martinez with his life, but what he needed was facts now, not more fucking advice.
Which was when it had occurred to him to call his old pal Angie Carlino. She was based in Tampa, not Naples, but they’d always had a soft spot for each other, and Angie had a history of helping Sam when push came to shove. Today was no exception; no questions asked, but Angie said she had a pal in Naples she could ask to keep an eye out for the young women, though without a license registration there wasn’t too much hope.
‘Soon as I get it, you’ll have it,’ Sam had told her.
‘And I’ll pass it straight on, kiddo.’
‘Off the record,’ Sam had reminded her.
‘Gotcha,’ Angie had assured him.
‘I have a cell number that might be Flanagan’s,’ Sam had remembered. ‘Any chance you could do something with that unofficially?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ she’d said, ‘I do have another friend with access to Triggerfish, so if she’s willing and has time, we might just be able to track that. But she’s not one of us so it could cost.’
‘Anything,’ Sam had said.
‘Maybe we should go out for a while?’ Cathy suggested again.
She had decided not to believe the story of the cat, thought it was probably just a grisly fairy tale spun, or at worst exaggerated, by Kez because of the dope.
Kez shook her head, rolling a fresh joint. ‘I’m fine here.’
‘I’d like to go running soon,’ Cathy said.
And find a phone, she added silently.
‘We can run any time.’ Kez’s fingers moved nimbly, her whole demeanour excitable now, a woman in a rush. ‘I need to go on talking.’
‘OK,’ Cathy said. ‘So long as—’
‘Did I tell you about the kids?’ Kez went straight on. ‘The ones who poked fun at me when I was around thirteen because of the way I looked, all legs and no breasts – no big change there then.’ She didn’t wait for Cathy to speak. ‘I showed them too, and I was stronger than they were, so showing them was a cinch.’
Last Run Page 19
