River's End

by Nora Roberts

  in my wife’s murder, and the man who arrested me.

  You may or may not be aware that he has attended all of my parole hearings since I began serving my sentence. You could say Frank and I have kept in touch.

  I read with interest your book Hunt by Night. Your clear-sighted and somewhat dispassionate look into the mind and methods of James Trolly made his systematic selection and mutilation of male prostitutes in West Hollywood more chilling and real than any of the stories in the media during his spree five years ago.

  As an actor I have a great appreciation for a strong, clearheaded writer.

  It has been some years since I’ve bothered to speak to reporters, to the freelance journalists and writers who initially clamored to tell my story. I made mistakes in whom I trusted, and was paid back by having my words twisted to suit the public’s thirst for scandal and gossip.

  In reading your work, I’ve come to believe that you’re interested in the truth, in the real people and events that took place. I find this interesting, given my connection to your father. Almost as if it’s been fated. I’ve come to believe in fate over these last years.

  I would like to tell you my story. I’d like you to write it. If you’re interested, I think you know where to find me.

  I’m not going anywhere for a few more months.

  Sincerely,

  Sam Tanner

  “Well, well.” Noah scratched his chin and read over the high points of the letter again. When his phone rang, he ignored it. When Caryn’s angry voice shot out accusing him of being an insensitive pig, cursing him and swearing revenge, he barely heard.

  “Oh, I’m interested all right, Sam. I’ve been interested in you for twenty years.”

  He had files stuffed full on Sam Tanner, Julie MacBride and the Beverly Hills murder his father had investigated. He’d kept them and had continued to accumulate data even after his painful visit to Olivia at college.

  He’d put the book aside, but not his interest in the case. And not his determination to one day write the book that would tell the story from all angles.

  But he’d put it aside for six years, he thought now, because every time he started to work on it again, he saw the way Olivia had looked at him when she’d stood by the desk in that little hotel room, with his papers gripped in her hands.

  This time when that image tried to form, he blocked it out. He couldn’t, and wouldn’t, channel his work because of a blighted love affair.

  An exclusive series of interviews with Sam Tanner. They’d have to be exclusive, Noah thought as he got to his feet to pace. He was going to make that a condition from the get-go.

  He’d need a list of everyone involved, even peripherally. Family, friends, employees, associates. Excitement pumped through his blood as he began to outline his research strategy. Court transcripts. Maybe he could track down some of the members of the jury. Police reports.

  The thought of that brought him up short. His father. He wasn’t at all sure his father was going to be happy with the idea.

  He headed to the shower to clean up. And to give himself time to think.

  The Brady house hadn’t changed a great deal over the years. It was still the same pale rose stucco, the lawn nicely mowed and the flowers on the edge of death. Since his father had retired from the force the year before, he’d piddled with a variety of hobbies including golf, photography, woodworking and cooking. He’d decided he hated golf after the first nine holes. He’d also decided that he had no eye for photography, no affinity for wood and no skill in the kitchen.

  Six months after his retirement, Celia sat him down, told him she loved him more than she had the day they’d married. And if he didn’t find something to do and get out of her house she was going to kill him in his sleep.

  The local youth center saved his life and his marriage. Most afternoons he could be found there, coaching the kids on the basketball court as he’d once coached his son, listening to their complaints and triumphs and breaking up the inevitable fights and squabbles.

  Mornings, after Celia had gone off to work, he spent puttering, doing crosswords or sitting in the backyard reading one of the paperback mystery novels he’d become addicted to since murder was no longer a part of his daily routine.

  That’s where Noah found him, his long legs stretched out in front of him as he relaxed in a lawn chair under a stingy patch of shade.

  He wore jeans, ancient sneakers and a comfortably wrinkled cotton shirt. His hair had gone a shimmering pewter gray but remained full and thick.

  “Do you know how hard it is to kill geraniums?” Noah glanced at the withered pink blooms struggling along the back deck. “It almost has to be premeditated.”

  “You’ll never convict me.” Pleased to see his son, Frank set aside the latest John Sandford novel.

  Merely shaking his head, Noah unwound the hose, switched it on and gave the desperate flowers another shot at life.

  “Didn’t expect to see you until Sunday.”

  “Sunday?”

  “Your mother’s birthday.” Frank narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t forget?”

  “No. I’ve already got her present. It’s a wolf.” He turned his head to grin. “Don’t panic, she doesn’t get to keep it here. She gets to adopt one in the wild, and they keep tabs on it for her. I figured she’d go for that—and the earrings I picked up.”

  “Show-off,” Frank grumbled and crossed his feet at the ankles. “You’re still going out to dinner with us Sunday, though?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  “You can bring that girl if you want, the one you’ve been seeing.”

  “That would be Caryn, who just left me a message on my machine calling me a pig. I’m steering clear of her.”

  “Good. Your mother didn’t like her.”

  “She only met her once.”

  “Didn’t like her. ‘Shallow,’ ‘snooty,’ ‘stupid’ I believe were the three words she used.”

  “It’s annoying how she’s always right.” Satisfied the geraniums would live another day, Noah turned off the hose and began to wind it back on its wheel.

  Frank said nothing for a moment, just watched while his son carefully aligned the hose. Carefully enough to make Frank’s lips twitch. “You know, I was a pretty good detective. I don’t think you came here to water my flowers.”

  When he couldn’t use the hose to stall any longer, Noah slid his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “I got a letter this morning. Guy in San Quentin wants me to tell his story.”

  “And?” Frank raised his eyebrows. “You get fairly regular correspondence from criminals these days, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, most of it’s useless. But I’m interested in this case. Been interested in it for a while.” He took off his sunglasses, met his father’s eyes levelly. “About twenty years now. It’s Sam Tanner, Dad.”

  There was a little hitch in Frank’s heart rate. Beat, hesitation, beat. He didn’t jolt. He’d been a cop too long to jump at shadows and ghosts, but he braced. “I see. No, I don’t see,” he said immediately and pushed out of his chair. “I put that son of a bitch away and now he writes to you? He wants to talk to the son of the man who helped send him over, who’s made goddamn sure he stayed over for twenty years? That’s bullshit, Noah. Dangerous bullshit.”

  “He mentioned the connection.” Noah kept his tone mild. He didn’t want to argue, hated knowing he was going to upset his father, but his decision was already made. “Why did you go to all his parole hearings?”

  “Some things you don’t forget. And because you don’t, because you can’t, you make sure the job stays done.” And he’d made a promise to a young girl with haunted eyes as they’d stood in the deep shadows of the forest. “He hasn’t forgotten either. What better way to pay me back than to use you?”

  “He can’t hurt me, Dad.”

  “I imagine that’s just what Julie MacBride thought the night she opened the door to him. Stay away from him, Noah. Put this one aside.”


  “You haven’t.” He held up a hand before Frank could speak. “Just listen a minute. You did your job. It cost you. I remember how it was. You’d pace the floor at night, or come out here to sit in the dark. I know there were others that followed you home, but nothing ever like this one. So I never forgot it either. I guess you could say it’s followed me, too. This one’s part of us. All of us. I’ve wanted to write this book for years. I have to talk to Sam Tanner.”

  “If you do that, Noah, and go on to write this book, drag out all that ugliness again, do you realize what it might do to Tanner’s other victims? The parents, the sister. Her child?”

  Olivia. No, Noah told himself, he was not going to cloud the issue with Olivia. Not now. “I thought about what it might do to you. That’s why I’m here. I wanted you to know what I’m going to do.”

  “It’s a mistake.”

  “Maybe, but it’s my life now, and my job.”

  “You think he’d have contacted you if you weren’t mine?” Fear and fury sprang out in equal measures, turning Frank’s eyes hard, snapping into his voice like the crack of a bullet. “The son of a bitch refuses to talk to anyone for years—and they’ve tried to get to him. Brokaw, Walters, Oprah. No comment, no interviews, no nothing. Now, just months before he’s likely to get out, he contacts you, offers you the story on a plate. Damn it, Noah, it doesn’t have to do with your work. It has to do with mine.”

  “Maybe.” Noah’s tone chilled as he slipped his sunglasses back on. “And maybe it has to do with both. Whether or not you respect my work, it’s what I do. And what I’m going to keep doing.”

  “I never said I didn’t respect your work.”

  “No, but you never said otherwise either.” It was a bruise Noah just realized he’d been nursing. “I’ll take my breaks where I find them and make them work for me. I learned that from you. I’ll see you Sunday.”

  Frank stepped forward, started to speak. But Noah was already striding away. So he sat, feeling his age, and stared down at his own hands.

  Noah’s foul mood drove home with him, like a separate energy, an irritable passenger in the stone-gray BMW. He kept the top down, the radio up, trying to blow away the anger, drown out his thoughts.

  He hated the sudden discovery that he was hurt because his father had never done a tap dance of joy over the success of his books.

  It was stupid, he thought. He was old enough not to need the whistles and claps of parental approval. He wasn’t eighteen and scoring the winning basket at the tail of the fourth quarter any longer. He was a grown man both happy and successful in his profession. He was well paid, and his ego got all the boosts it required from reviews and royalty checks, thank you very much.

  But he knew, had known all along, that his father disapproved of the path he’d taken with his writing. Because neither had wanted to confront the other, little had been said.

  Until today, Noah thought.

  Sam Tanner had done more than offer a story to be told. He’d put the first visible crack in a relationship Noah had counted on all his life. It had been there before, hidden, from the first moment he’d decided to write about all the ripples on the river of murder.

  Fiction would have been fine, Noah knew. Entertaining. But digging and exposing the realities, stripping down killers, victims, survivals for public consumption. That’s what his father disliked—and couldn’t understand.

  And just now, because he didn’t know how to explain it, Noah’s mood teetered on the edge of vile.

  Spotting Caryn’s car parked in front of his house tripped it over the rest of the way.

  He found her sitting on his back deck, her long, smooth legs clad in tiny pink shorts, a wide-brimmed straw hat protecting her face from the sun. When he opened the glass door, she looked up, her eyes brimming behind the amber lenses of her designer sunglasses. Her lips trembled.

  “Oh, Noah. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

  He cocked his head. It would’ve been fascinating if it hadn’t been so tedious. It was a pattern he recognized from their weeks together. Fight, curse, accuse, throw things, slam out. Then come back with tearful eyes and apologize.

  Now, unless she’d decided to deviate from form, she would slither around him and offer sex.

  When she rose, smiling tremulously as she crossed to him and slid her arms around him, he decided she just didn’t have the imagination to improvise.

  “I’ve been so unhappy without you these last few days.” She lifted her mouth to his. “Let’s go inside so I can show you how much I’ve missed you.”

  It worried him a little that he wasn’t tempted, not in the least.

  “Caryn. It’s not going to work. Why don’t we just say it was fun while it lasted?”

  “You don’t mean it.”

  “Yes.” He had to nudge her back so she’d stop rubbing against him. “I do.”

  “There’s someone else, isn’t there? All the time we were living together, you were cheating on me.”

  “No, there’s no one else. And we weren’t living together. You just started staying here.”

  “You bastard. You’ve already had another woman in our bed.” She rushed past him, into the house.

  “It’s not our bed. It’s my bed. Goddamn it.” He was more weary than angry, until he walked into the bedroom and saw she was already ripping at his sheets. “Hey! Cut it out.”

  He made a grab for her, but she rolled onto the bed, leaped off the other side. Before he could stop her, she’d grabbed the bedside lamp and heaved it at him. The best he could do was block it so the base didn’t rap him between the eyes.

  The sound of the glass crashing on the floor snapped the already unsteady hold on his temper.

  “Okay, that’s it. Get out. Get the hell out of my house and stay away from me.”

  “You never cared. You never thought about my feelings.”

  “You’re right, absolutely.” He went for her as she made a beeline for his prized basketball trophy. “I didn’t give a damn about you.” He panted it out as he struggled to get her out without losing any of his own skin to her long, lethal nails. “I’m a pig, a creep, a son of a bitch.”

  “I hate you!” She shrieked it, slapping and kicking as he dragged her to the front door. “I wish you were dead!”

  “Just pretend I am. And I’ll do the same for you.” He shoved her outside, shut the door, then leaned back against it.

  He let out a long breath, rolled his shoulders. Then because he hadn’t heard her car start, glanced out the window. Just in time to see her rake her keys over the glossy finish of his BMW.

  He roared like a wounded lion. By the time he had flung open the door and burst out, she was leaping into her own car, squealing away.

  Hands clenched, he looked at the damage. Deep, nasty scratches formed letters on the hood. PI. At least she hadn’t had the satisfaction of finishing the thought, he decided.

  Okay, fine. He’d have the car repaired while he was out of town. It seemed like a very good time to head north to San Quentin.

  twelve

  Noah’s first distant glimpse of San Quentin made him think of an old fortress now serving as some sort of thematic resort complex. Disneyland for cons.

  The building was the color of sand and stretched out over San Francisco Bay with its multilevels and towers and turrets with a faintly exotic air.

  It didn’t smack of prison unless you thought of the armed guards in those towers, the spread of security lights that would turn the air around it orange and eerie at night. And all the steel cages it held inside.

  He’d opted to take the ferry from San Francisco to Marin County and now stood at the rail while it glided over water made choppy by the wind. He found the architecture of the prison odd and somehow very Californian, but doubted the inmates had much appreciation for the structure’s aesthetics.

  It had taken him only hours to clear through channels for permission to visit. It made Noah wonder if Tanner had connection
s on the inside that had helped smooth the way.

  Didn’t matter, Noah decided while the wind cut through his hair like jagged shards of glass. The results were what counted.