Sawyer asked. "How were you going to set the propane off?"
He smiled and blinked, didn't answer, he was a magician protecting the secret of his best trick. "Did the lady die? The one who lived there? Did the cat get her?"
"Yes." I said, waiting for him to react to the news, he didn't seem to care, theo's death wasn't particularly consequential to him.
"You tell me, then, so how did those two get on to me? The FBI types? Why did they suddenly show up to help you out?"
"Dr. Dresser had noticed that a lot of his old friends were dying, he was a journal writer and E-mail nut, he kept his mother apprised of his concerns. When he died too, she got suspicious. Involving the FBI was her idea, and her money."
"How did they find me?"
"They didn't, we did." I looked at Sawyer. "We tracked down your father through our memories of old patients. Had some false starts. But we put it together from there."
"Did Loomis help?"
I lied. I said. "Not really."
He fingered the gun as though it were a hypodermic full of truth serum he could employ anytime he chose.
"Well, He helped me. But then I had a little leverage with him. Ironic, though, about Dr. Dresser's writing tripping me up. It was my father's notebooks that got me going in the first place."
Tom, or Patrick, seemed to want to talk. I was surprised how much this felt like his usual therapy session. Except for the gun, of course, and Sawyer. Through my anxiety I was trying to decide how much of what I knew about this young man was psychologically accurate and how much of it had been act. I quickly decided that he wasn't sophisticated enough to fool me about his character and I could expect those traits to endure through this encounter.
I could have reflected back to him the juxtaposition of his mention of Reggie Loomis and his father's notebooks in the same breath. I didn't.
Sawyer did. "You're talking about your father's speculation about D. B. Cooper, aren't you?"
"Speculation? You know. I don't think so. You should see the case on paper in black and white. Dad had Loomis down cold for that hijacking. But he liked Loomis. Respected him. Emulated him, even. Dad wouldn't ever have turned Reggie Loomis in to the feds for that hijacking. Reggie doesn't know it, of course, but I wouldn't have turned him in either, the threat was good leverage, though." He shook his head. "Damn cat got in the way, that's all." He smiled. "My father used to hold up his index finger sometimes and make these important pronouncements, he called them 'life lessons.' Well, here's a life lesson for you." He held up an index finger. "You can't plan for everything. No matter how hard you try, you can't plan for everything."
In my therapy voice. I said, "I don't understand something. Why did you decide to take up your father's work? Why not just leave it alone?"
He scrunched his face up in a consternated way I'd seen in his previous visits to my office, as he relaxed the muscles, he said. "Couple of reasons. From the time I was little. I learned to share his hate for all of you for what you did to our family, that was one. Second. I wanted to prove something to him, I guess."
With obvious disbelief. Sawyer asked. "So your father isn't dead?"
Patrick widened his eyes and smiled at the question in a manner that increased my already swollen discomfort. But he didn't answer. "Did I blow it in New Zealand? I shouldn't have done that, should I? Gone overseas?"
I answered. "The FBI agents are confident that they can use immigration and airline records to identify you. Eventually., anyway."
"You know, I knew that. I knew that. But I did it anyway. Jeez. Stupid. Sorry. Dad."
"Your father went overseas once, too, The cruise ship killing. It appears that he had a false passport, though. You didn't?"
He shook his head. "That was my favorite. Of all the notebooks of the killings, that was my favorite, he planned it forever. Do you know how he did it? How he made her disappear?"
"Yes," I said. I knew he was talking about Wendy Asimoto's gruesome end, and he seemed oblivious to the fact that he was sitting with two people who might have cared about her, he only wanted to talk about the ingenious way his father had disposed of her body. "Your father incinerated her body on board the ship."
He clapped. "Bravo, bravo. You figured that out? Perhaps I underestimated all of you."
"Did your father do the drive-by in L.A.?"
He looked embarrassed. "He wasn't proud of that one, he called it a 'duck shoot' in his journal. Vowed not to use guns again. No matter how well planned."
I stared at the pistol. "But he broke his vow with the hunting accident?"
Patrick raised his eyebrows. "You have the order wrong, the hunting accident came first."
Sawyer said. "You didn't sabotage my plane, did you?"
He shook his head. "Your plane? No. What happened to your plane?"
She told him.
"No. I wouldn't have done that. Sabotaging landing gear isn't lethal enough, any good pilot could do what you did, that would be an even more lame attempt than what I did with Dr. Gregory's furnace, and anyway, that would have been copying. I didn't want to copy him. I wanted each of mine to be original. Each one of his killings was original. I wanted mine to be, too, Life lesson,” he said in an odd baritone voice as he raised the index finger of his right hand. "Always avoid a recognizable MO."
He stared at me. His eyes were warm. "You're a better therapist than Dr. Dresser. I actually think you helped me a little. Do you know he wanted me to take Zoloft? I pretended I was. It made him feel better, the right medicine always makes the doctor feel better." He smiled bashfully. "Thought you might want to know."
"You were Dr. Dresser's patient, too?"
"Yes. Getting to know each of you first was particularly cool. Dad couldn't have done that part, of course, but he would have appreciated it, the panache."
"Was I going to be your next victim? Or was Sawyer?"
"If the feds hadn't shown up, you mean? You were next, then I was going to go to California, live there a while, get to know Dr. Faire a little, and take care of her and that other lady."
What? "Other lady? What other lady?"
He widened his eyes. "I'm sorry, but I'm bad with names, she's older. I guess, uh—"
"Dr. Masters? Amy Masters?"
"Right, that's it. Don't tell me she's already dead?" He made a tsking sound with his tongue and the roof of his mouth.
Sawyer nodded.
"I guess I can cross her off my list, then."
"You didn't kill her?" I asked, feeling relief she hadn't been murdered.
"I would have. But, no. I didn't."
"How were you going to kill me?"
"You mean if things hadn't gotten so rushed?" He waited for my nod. "Your bike. It would have been a piece of cake. You know that route you do in Left Hand Canyon? Where it's real steep on the downhill?"
"Yes." I did that ride a couple of times a month when the weather allowed. When the conditions were perfect, I could fly.
"You seem to do it pretty regularly. I figured I'd precipitate a little rockslide when you were going about fifty, there's one curve where I figured you would lose control for sure and go over the edge. It's two hundred feet down, maybe more."
"You know. I guessed you would use my bike, the other stuff you did, the beam falling on my head? The carbon monoxide? Those were impulsive? You were improvising when you did those things?"
"Yeah, The beam especially. But you have to admit, despite my lack of planning, you were pretty damn lucky. One of the guys at the station said he heard from a friend in Boulder that you guys had two CO detectors instead of one. Who has two CO detectors? What are the odds of being tripped up by that, huh? Dad would have forgiven me that one, I think. No amount of planning can overcome something like that, and that beam in your house? That was my fault. It was supposed to be the whole damn roof that came down. My engineering skills are rusty."
"What about me?" Sawyer asked.
"Sorry. So sorry. Hadn't got there yet. Life lesson: One at a
time. One at a time. Don't try to plan two murders at once. Each one requires tremendous creativity, actually, when you think about it, it's an art. Murdering people and not arousing any suspicion. None. Imagine? It's an art."
He looked at her, then at me.
"Really," he insisted. "It is."
FORTY-FIVE
He lifted the gun with both hands and hefted it as though he wanted to assess its weight. "Since I know they're watching me, I have to be careful what I do next. It's why I bailed out with the propane. Too many possible witnesses. This next one has to be pretty believable if I want to get away with it. Dad always said life's performances are hardest when you have an audience."
"Who is watching you?" Sawyer asked.
"You don't know?" He examined her eyes, then mine. "Really? The FBI guy and that Boulder cop— the one who seems to be your friend. Dr. Gregory, they have my townhouse staked out right now. Which tells me they don't have a warrant, not that they'd find anything even if they did. But that means that they really don't have any evidence tying me to anything. Not yet, not enough to take to a judge. Despite their suspicions. I could still walk. My first goal, of course, was never to be identified as a killer. My secondary goal was never to be convicted, that one's still within reach. I think." He threaded his finger through the trigger guard. "As long as you two don't survive."
Sawyer and I both reacted physically; the g-forces of fear forcing us back against our chairs.
"Don't worry. I'm not going to shoot you unless you get stupid. Dr. Gregory, would you please get Dr. Faire a piece of paper? A blank one."
I did.
"I need a prescription from you,” he said to Sawyer. "Make it for... Xanax. Good. Put my name on it, my real name. Good. Sign it. Date it. Good. Oh, almost forgot, your DEA number, too. Yes. See, now you're one of my doctors, too. I like it like that. Things feel complete. Hand it over to me, please."
He folded the paper carefully into quarters and tucked it in his shirt pocket. "Now we go." He stood and swept my keys off my desk, he waved the gun as though he were a theater usher directing us to our seats with a flashlight. "Out the back way; I think, we'll be taking your car. Dr. Gregory. I'm afraid you two are about to have an unfortunate accident. But I really do have a nice place picked out for you to die."
A door leads from my office to the backyard of the old house. My car was parked on the adjacent driveway, the snow that had been so persistent up at Theo's cabin that morning had never really amounted to anything down here, the ground was dotted with leaves from a nearby ash and debris from our neighbor's linden, but there was no snow remaining on anything.
I had already decided that I might as well do something desperate here in town. Lauren had taught me once that no matter what immediate jeopardy it caused, you should never let a kidnapper take you someplace where his control over you increased. My best location for a last-ditch effort was here in town, on my own property.
I caught Sawyer's eye and hoped she could see my determination. Patrick Rand apparently did, he kept the pocketed handgun focused on her, not on me, underlining what the consequences would be if I tried anything. "Don't be foolish,” he warned. "I want you to drive. Dr. Faire. Dr. Gregory, you ride up front. I'll be in back, we'll go straight up into Boulder Canyon."
Lamely, I said, "Your father did Boulder Canyon for a car crash. One of his coworkers from the plant. You don't want to repeat that, do you?"
"Nice try. You have pieced a lot of this together, though. You're both quite resourceful. I respect that and I'll keep it in mind. But we're not going to have a crash in Boulder Canyon, actually, we're going to turn up Magnolia, there's a lovely place up there that I want to show you."
He never took his eyes off me or his gun off the middle of Sawyer's back as he spoke. His calm demeanoa chilled me. I was absolutely certain he would shoot Sawyer if I tried to escape.
"Take those damn catering things out of the back of the car, please. Stack them over there, we'll need a lot of room. If I see you open a single case to search for something to use as a weapon, she's dead."
I followed his instructions to the letter.
In a minute we were on our way.
The road up Magnolia cuts off Boulder Canyon not too far from town. But the foothills of the Rocky Mountains rise precipitously west of Boulder. By the time we got to Magnolia, the cliffs were already steep, the road was already treacherous, and the possible isolation was almost total. On these winding roads I couldn't figure out how Rand was going to get us to crash at a high enough speed to kill us and still manage to ensure his own escape.
I couldn't piece it together. Was he going to jump from the car?
Dusk was blacker in the canyon than it was up Magnolia, where the light of a moon that was only two days past full shimmered off the fresh snow and the golden grasses of the high meadows. Sawyer actually commented on how pretty it was.
He directed her to take a turn off Magnolia down
one dirt road and then down another, the congested housing that was clustered on both sides of the main road was quickly behind us, the road we were on was narrow, twisty, and in ill repair, there was no way he was going to engineer a crash up here that would guarantee two fatalities and one survivor. I began to question his judgment.
He ordered another turn, and then another, the last one took us from the road up a steep driveway marked by a sign from Mock Realty, the sign informed us that we were driving onto 6.3 acres with a great building site and a well, the long driveway had been badly rutted by runoff, and the big Land Cruiser listed hard to the left as we climbed.
"Keep going,” he said. "Careful, now. Don't want any accidents, do we?"
At the top of the driveway, which probably extended almost a quarter of a mile, we reached a relatively flat clearing, the day's light was almost gone, but it was apparent that this building site commanded stunning views to the south and east. Far in the distance, the sky above Denver glowed as though irradiated.
I grew even more nervous as he said. "Pull straight ahead. Go on."
Sawyer urged the big car forward across the clearing and slowly approached the edge of a cliff, the cavern
below us was dark. I couldn't tell how steep the incline was. I couldn't tell how deep the fall would be.
I figured plenty steep and plenty deep.
Five feet from the edge, he said. "Stop."
She did, he said. "No, a couple more feet." I heard her sigh as she gingerly edged forward. I wondered if she had worked out in her mind what was about to happen.
"Kill the lights. Turn off the engine for now. Good." He opened the door to the backseat. Chill air filled the car. "Don't move."
I didn't need to look; I could hear what he was doing behind us, he was lowering the sections of the backseat so they would be flat with the cargo area.
"Okay,” he ordered, his voice crisper now. "Now undress. Both of you."
We stared at each other. I saw sorrow, not fear, flood Sawyer's face and imagined she was thinking about two other deaths staged in another car, he said. "Come on, everything. Take everything off."
Sawyer didn't look surprised at Rand's order, maybe she had discerned what was coming. I tugged off my sweater in a swift motion, she was wearing a suede coat, she struggled out of it. I helped her get it off her arms.
"Come on. Don't procrastinate. Dad hated procrastination."
As we unbuttoned our shirts. I pondered whether I wanted to take my chance going over the cliff in the car, or if I preferred to risk death at the hands of this man and his semiautomatic handgun.
Methodically, in the least erotic manner I could ever have imagined, we removed the rest of our clothing. It took a couple of minutes and then I was naked beside Sawyer and, except for her socks, she was naked beside me.
"Start the car now. Dr. Faire. It's way too cold for two old lovers to do it up here without heat, right?"
"No,” she said, without conviction. I glanced over at her, she was covered in gooseflesh, her t
iny nipples were as hard as the steel in our murderer's hands.
"Do it,” he said. "And the second you do. I want to see your hands on your heads. Both of you."
She hesitated for a good twenty seconds, then reached out and turned the key, the car obeyed the command; the engine rumbled to life, we raised our hands as instructed.
"Now,” he said. "Climb into the back. Don't get out. Climb right over the console. One at a time."
While Sawyer moved gracelessly to the back of the car. I watched Rand, hoping for an opening, the barrel of his gun never left her. I could throw open my door and run into the night. I might actually make it. No way Sawyer would.
Defeated. I followed Sawyer to the back of the vehicle.
"Now, start. Go ahead. You know you want to do it. I might even let you finish before I.., well.., whatever. You won't know when the end is near. I'll be quiet. Enjoy. Go on. Go on." His voice was encouraging, generous.
Obscene, he was managing to rape both of us at the same time.
The whole thing could not have been more incongruous. Sawyer sat next to me, naked. I could smell her, almost taste her, the view was heavenly, the setting serene, and all I wanted to do was run.
Suddenly, she reached up and hooked my neck with her elbow, pulling me down to her.
"No." I said, resisting. "No." She clutched me tighter to her.
My face was buried in her hair. "Somebody's here,” she whispered. "Get ready to open the back." With that she kissed me, pulling me sideways, upright, then over, so that our heads now faced the back of the car and not the front. I could feel the fabric of her socks against the top of my feet and the weight of her breast against my arm, with my left hand, I groped randomly for the latch on the back hatch door.
I whispered, "Got it." Please. Whoever is out there. Say something. Do something.
Stop this.
The sounds almost overlapped as Rand simultaneously closed the rear passenger door and opened the driver's door. I raised my head to see what he was doing.
Manner of Death Page 37
