Untouchable

by Jayne Ann Krentz

“That is also a rather breathtaking thought,” Rebecca said.

  “Whatever you do, don’t say another word about it, not in this house. I’ll do my research, lay out whatever I find for the Old Man, and then we’re leaving.”

  “What excuse will you give your father for our sudden departure?”

  Easton smiled a little. “I’ll tell him the truth. You’re pregnant. You need to be protected from stress, and right now the situation in this house is extremely stressful.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “What’s your status there in Eclipse Bay?” Anson roared.

  Jack winced and came to an abrupt halt on the bluff path. He held the phone away from his ear. Anson Salinas had an inside voice, but he had been a cop most of his life, which meant that, like an opera star or a drill instructor, he had another voice, as well—the one he had once employed to take charge of barroom brawls, emergency situations and, occasionally, three teenage foster sons.

  Anson was no longer a cop. He ran the office of Cutler, Sutter & Salinas, the family’s private investigation agency in Seattle. The business was starting to thrive in large part because Anson had turned out to have all the talents of a natural-born CEO, plus he had people skills.

  His command post was the reception desk. Anson’s was the first face that potential clients saw when they walked through the door. Most were reassured by his air of professional competence and his understanding manner. They sensed that he was a man they could trust with their secrets.

  Jack figured the clients picked up on the same vibe that he and Max and Cabot had responded to intuitively on that long-ago night when Anson had driven straight into hell to rescue them and the other kids trapped inside the blazing barn. If Anson gave you his word, you could count on him to always have your back.

  “And a bright and cheery good morning to you, too, Anson,” he said. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “Who are you and what did you do with Jack Lancaster?”

  “I’m trying to learn how to project a more positive vibe.”

  Anson’s voice resumed normal volume. “Unless you’ve got some actual good news I’m going to have to assume you’ve been spending way too much time with your new meditation instructor.”

  Jack looked at the cottage at the far end of the beach path. Winter and Arizona had disappeared inside a short time ago armed with buckets, mops, scrub brushes and strong disinfectants. In small towns like Eclipse Bay there were no commercial services offering crime scene cleanup.

  “Looks like I’ll be spending more time with Winter,” he said.

  “And that would be because?”

  “I just got word from the local chief of police that there appears to be some confusion as to the identity of the last person who saw Kendall Moseley alive. The consensus is that it was a janitor, but no one can locate her.”

  Anson grunted. “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not. That means I’ve got nothing new on this end, and until I figure out what’s going on, I don’t think it would be a good idea to let Winter wander off on her own.”

  “Think she’s still a target?” Anson sounded thoughtful now.

  “She’s the only lead I’ve got so, yes, she may be in danger. It depends.”

  “On what?” Anson asked.

  “On whether Moseley really was murdered last night. The hospital is standing by their verdict. They are convinced that Moseley died due to complications from a traumatic head injury.”

  “But you’re not buying that,” Anson said. It was not a question.

  “There probably isn’t going to be an autopsy,” Jack said. “Not in a small town like the one where Moseley died, at least not unless I come up with something more than I’ve got now. Autopsies are expensive.”

  “Lot of drugs out there that wouldn’t show up in a routine autopsy, anyway,” Anson mused.

  “Did Xavier come up with anything on Kendall Moseley?”

  “Yep, that’s why I’m calling. The kid is here in the office with me. He’s been working his computer since you called early this morning. He’s got some information for you.”

  The kid’s name was Xavier Kennington. He was Cabot’s nephew and he wasn’t technically a kid. He had just turned eighteen and he was newly enrolled as a freshman in a college in Seattle. Officially he was an intern at the Cutler, Sutter & Salinas agency but in reality Xavier was pretty much the entire IT department. Jack knew that he and Anson, Max and Cabot were all competent when it came to conducting online searches, but none of them could navigate the dark territory of the Internet with the intuitive skill of an eighteen-year-old who had grown up wired into his phone and a computer.

  “Let me talk to him,” Jack said.

  “Hang on,” Anson said. “I’m putting you on speaker.”

  “I’m here,” Xavier said.

  The eagerness and enthusiasm in his voice made Jack feel old. Xavier was still young enough and fresh enough to get excited about the hunt.

  “What have you got for me?” Jack asked.

  “I confirmed what the local chief of police told you. Kendall Moseley had a history of violence against women. Sent a couple of girlfriends and an ex-wife to the emergency room. At least two restraining orders were issued. A year ago a judge ordered him to attend anger management classes.”

  “Obviously that didn’t work,” Jack said.

  “No,” Xavier said. “The point is, I didn’t have any trouble digging up a lot of information about him online. He wasn’t exactly trying to hide.”

  “In other words, anyone looking for a pawn to weaponize and use against Winter would have had to look no farther than her client list.”

  “Takes some doing to get a man worked up enough to go out and try to murder a woman,” Anson pointed out.

  “Especially when you consider that the deranged man in question had been given a post-hypnotic suggestion that should have made him disinclined to follow that particular woman.”

  “No offense to Ms. Meadows, but if I were you, I wouldn’t put too much stock in the power of hypnosis,” Anson said.

  “I know you’re skeptical,” Jack said.

  “I’m not alone. Hell, if hypnosis really worked, everyone who is trying to lose weight would be thin by now.”

  “Not everyone can be easily hypnotized,” Jack said, going for an academic approach. “Studies show—”

  “Forget the studies,” Anson said. “Here’s what I know—stalkers have a lot of loose screws. The one thing you can be sure of is that a guy like Kendall Moseley isn’t going to forget about the object of his obsession just because someone gave him a post-hypnotic suggestion. Not for long, at any rate.”

  “We also know that Zane was brilliant when it came to manipulating people,” Jack said. “He might have encountered a little resistance at first because of the hypnotic suggestion, but in the end, Moseley probably would have been nothing more than a puppet.”

  “And Zane would have been the puppet master,” Anson concluded. He paused. “You really think you were the main target last night?”

  “If Zane was involved, yes. If not, well, it’s over.”

  “You know that I’m a founding member of the Zane Conspiracy Club,” Anson said. “But I feel it’s my job to keep you and Cabot and Max and young Xavier here from shooting at shadows.”

  “I know,” Jack said. “You’re the one in charge of common sense. That’s why you have the corner office and the big window. Talk to me, Xavier. What else did you come up with?”

  “Moseley spent a lot of time in some real sick chat rooms,” Xavier said.

  “No surprise there,” Jack said. “It’s his chat room friend I’m after. Did you find him?”

  “Not yet, but I’m still looking,” Xavier said. “I’ve got a couple of leads. Moseley was so thrilled with his special chat room friend that he mentioned him
in some of the other chat rooms he visited.”

  Anticipation crackled through Jack. “Any chance you might be able to find the friend?”

  “Maybe,” Xavier said. “I can’t guarantee it, though. Unlike Kendall Moseley, the friend knows how to hide.”

  “We know Zane has always been good at navigating online, but he’s in his late forties now,” Jack said. “That means he’s not the whiz kid that he was in the past. My money’s on you, Xavier.”

  “Thanks,” Xavier said. “But even if Zane isn’t as slick as he once was, you should probably consider the possibility that he may have hired himself some cutting-edge talent.”

  “I doubt it,” Jack said. “He won’t trust anyone with an online identity that could be traced back to him. He can’t afford to take that kind of risk. He would be opening himself up to blackmail, for one thing. No, if he’s out there, he will be his own IT department. I’m sure of it. But that doesn’t mean he will be working alone. He hides behind people. It’s one of the primary aspects of his signature.”

  “That brings up an interesting question,” Anson said. “How did he assemble a new team here in the States without us noticing? We’ve been watching for him for years. Think he brought people with him from wherever he’s been hiding out?”

  “Maybe,” Jack said. “But that would be tricky. He needs people on the ground here who can blend into the background. Anything else?”

  Anson spoke again. “The kid and I saved the best for last. Thought you’d like to know that Xavier had some luck with that old photo of Zane.”

  “I remember,” Jack said. “The one that Cabot found when he investigated the death of that artist a while back.”

  “There was a name on the back,” Xavier said. “Jason Gatley. Couldn’t find it in any of the old phone directories but Anson told me that you think Zane probably grew up here in Washington State.”

  “That’s our theory,” Jack said. “We’re going with it because we know he fired up his first big con—the cult—just outside of Seattle. That was when he was in his early twenties. Makes sense that he would have started out on his home turf, a place where he knew the territory.”

  “I decided to do a search of Washington State high school yearbooks,” Xavier said. “The good news is that a lot of yearbooks have been digitized.”

  “People who research their ancestry love them,” Anson said.

  “Anson and I went through every single yearbook that we could find for Washington high schools that date from around the time that we figured Zane would have been a student,” Xavier continued. “We didn’t find any matches. We were starting to think that Zane hadn’t grown up in Washington after all. And then Anson had a really cool idea. He suggested we look at high schools that had a history of having lost their student records in a fire, schools that had not gotten around to digitizing their old yearbooks.”

  “Brilliant idea, Anson,” Jack said.

  “Should have thought of it earlier,” Anson said. “We found a handful of schools that had some fire damage. Finally came up with a solid hit. Tell him, Xavier.”

  “Gatley attended a small, rural school in Eastern Washington,” Xavier said. “The school was closed years ago. Luckily I was able to track down a former teacher. Anson talked to her.”

  “She remembered Gatley,” Anson said. “She says she was sure that there was something wrong with the boy but it was nothing she could put her finger on. She just figured he would end up either very, very rich or in prison.”

  “The problem,” Xavier continued, “is that the trail ends there in that small town. Anson and I couldn’t find any leads. Gatley or Zane just disappeared at some point in his senior year in high school.”

  “People can still vanish if they know what they’re doing,” Jack said.

  “And if they know how to rewrite their own personal history,” Anson added. “Looks like that’s what Jason Gatley, aka Quinton Zane, did. There is no record of him ever getting a driver’s license. No college records. No property tax records.”

  “But you did find something, didn’t you?” Jack asked.

  “How did you know?” Xavier asked.

  “Call me psychic. Probably a side effect of all that meditation I’ve been doing lately.”

  “Whatever. Get this,” Xavier said. He was trying to sound as cool and professional as Anson but excitement crackled in his voice. “It looks like Jason Gatley was adopted at birth in a private, off-the-books transaction.”

  Jack registered another ping somewhere on his private mental Internet.

  “Now that,” he said, “is very interesting. How did you come up with that information?”

  Anson chuckled. “No records doesn’t mean there are no memories and it doesn’t mean that people won’t talk. I had a chat with the chief of police of the town where Gatley grew up. He’s retired now and living in Arizona. But when I got a hold of him, he was more than willing to talk. He said a couple named Gatley who had never had children showed up one day with an infant boy. They claimed the baby was a nephew and that the mother had died but the gossip in town was that they bought the kid on the black market.”

  Jack tightened his grip on the phone. “Did you find any family connection?”

  “No,” Xavier said. “The baby just appeared out of nowhere.”

  Anson cut in with the rest of the story. “The cop I spoke with said pretty much the same thing the teacher said—that it was obvious as the kid got older that he was going to be trouble. The chief figured the boy would end up dead or in jail. Then he realized just how smart Gatley was and he revised his assessment. Decided the kid might become a killer. He said everyone in town breathed a sigh of relief when Gatley vanished.”

  “Did the chief have any idea of where Gatley was headed when he left town?” Jack asked.

  “No,” Xavier said, barely able to contain his adrenaline high, “but get this: Gatley disappeared shortly after the couple that adopted him died in a house fire.”

  Another ping. Jack got a cold rush of certainty.

  “People don’t change their personal currents,” he said softly.

  “The chief told me that he always suspected that Gatley was responsible for the fire that killed his adoptive parents,” Anson concluded. “But there was zero evidence.”

  “We need to know more about that adoption,” Jack said.

  “We’re still looking,” Anson said. “But we don’t have any leads at the moment, and I’ve gotta tell you, I doubt we’ll find any.”

  “What about the Gatley couple?” Jack said.

  “Nothing,” Xavier said. “I couldn’t even find tax records. If that’s Zane’s work, the guy is good.”

  Anson snorted softly. “I might be able to turn up a few more people who remember Zane as a kid but I don’t think it would add much to our profile.”

  “I agree,” Jack said. “Keep your heads down, both of you. We have to assume that Zane is watching.”

  “Pretty sure the phones are safe,” Xavier said. “I’ve got the latest encryption on all of them.”

  “Are Cabot and Max working cases at the moment?” Jack asked.

  “Yep,” Anson said. “Corporate business has been brisk ever since the Night Watch case. Cabot’s on a missing person job for a very wealthy entrepreneur. The family doesn’t want any publicity.”

  “Max is trying to find a pair of swindlers who scammed a group of senior citizens out of their life savings,” Xavier said. “The seniors don’t want their relatives to know what happened. You know how it is.”

  “The victims don’t want to be humiliated in front of their families,” Jack said. “They’re afraid they’ll be declared incompetent.”

  “Right,” Anson said. “But Max and Cabot will drop everything to head to Eclipse Bay if you need them.”

  “Keep them in the loop but tell them I think it’
s crucial that they don’t react at this point,” Jack said. “If Zane is watching and concludes that we suspect he was behind the attack on Winter, there’s a forty or fifty percent probability that he’ll leave the country. If he does, we’ll lose him again.”

  “Only forty or fifty percent?” Xavier asked. “Why isn’t it ninety or a hundred percent probability that he’ll run?”

  “Because I think he’s committed now,” Jack said. “He’ll have a hard time turning back.”

  “You got a plan?” Anson asked.

  “Working on one,” Jack said. “I’ll call you back when I have a better idea of what I’m doing.”

  Silence hummed for a moment.

  “Call soon,” Anson said.

  He ended the connection.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Jack clipped the phone to his belt and stood looking down at the thrashing surf. The wild waves appeared chaotic; all the more so today in the wake of the storm. But the reality was that they were the end result of the spectacularly complex network of currents generated by the unfathomable power of the world’s oceans.

  There were fierce forces at work but there was also a rhythm, a pattern. If you had enough data you could unravel the deepest mysteries of the sea. Theoretically, if you had enough data you could predict a rogue wave.

  Sometimes he wondered if he had followed the wrong career path. He could have lost himself in the study of fluid dynamics. Instead, he had immersed himself in the deep, dark undercurrents of the criminal mind.

  Then again, maybe he had never really had a choice. Winter claimed that in order to do his best, most satisfying work, he had to heed the call of the inner voice that urged him to explore certain kinds of crimes. He had to work the cold cases, the cases that kept people awake at night.

  He understood the dark lure of what Winter labeled his “mission.” But he had studied enough bad guys to know that there were serious risks involved. He wondered if Winter realized that his mission was damn close to what could be described as a compulsion. And compulsions were driven by very deep, very dark currents.