Because I'm Watching (44 page)

So Benedict did his research and online he found out all about her.

Yes, Helen was the name she'd been given at birth. Her beginnings were humble; she had grown up in Nepal as the daughter of missionaries. When she was a teenager, her parents were killed in a rockfall and she was sent to the United States to live with her family in the South. She finished high school at sixteen and began college at Duke University, where her unusual beauty attracted Nauplius Brassard's attention. After a brief courtship, she graciously consented to be his wife and dedicated herself to him and his well-being. She did not work, did not express independent opinions, and during the days when he worked or during the evenings when he made appearances at government functions and glittering parties, she never left his side.

Very neat. Very pat. But nowhere did any source explain why she could not speak. And that single fact made Benedict doubt the whole story—although the numerous politically incorrect among the online community suggested that an inability to speak made her the perfect wife for Nauplius Brassard.

The world abounded with jackasses.

And Benedict's curiosity was piqued.

Before the voyage had even begun, the crew had studied the ship's manifest and passenger list, memorizing every face and name. Now Benedict did the same, and when he was satisfied with his research and his ability to greet the guests, he joined the convivial table that nightly gathered after dinner at the bar at the aft of the ship, a table that included five retired Southern high school teachers making their annual pilgrimage to Europe, two university professors on sabbatical, a group of Spanish and Portuguese wine merchants, a skinny eighty-year-old corporate lawyer—and Nauplius Brassard and his wife Helen.

Benedict turned a chair from another table and dragged it over. “May I join you?”

For a mere second, conversation faltered.

One of the middle-aged females scooted over. “We are all friends. Sit next to me.” She placed her hand on her husband's arm. “We're Juan Carlos and Carmen Mendoza, wine merchants from Barcelona … and you are Benedict Howard.”

Apparently he wasn't the only one who had studied the roster. “That's right, from Baltimore, Maryland, USA. I buy and sell things.”

“On a grand scale,” Juan Carlos said drily. “The Howard family is known for its business … acumen.”

A nice way to say
ruthlessness
. “Yes.” Benedict looked toward the opposite end of the long table. “But I interrupted the conversation. Please, continue while I sit here and absorb the bonhomie.” In fact, he had interrupted Helen Brassard, who had been animated and flushed as she recounted some story by signing while Nauplius Brassard translated in his faintly accented voice.

Cool and calm, she sipped her champagne and looked him in the eyes. She nodded. She put down her champagne, lifted her hands, and signed, “Of course. I was telling this illustrious company about the surprise party my husband threw for me for my twenty-seventh birthday.”

“Fascinating,” he murmured.

With a turn of the head, she dismissed Benedict and spoke to the assemblage. “On the banks of the Loire in the month of June … he scheduled the Osiris String Quartet to play chamber music and had a catered picnic flown in from Vienna and laid on blankets on the grass. He hired a film crew to record each precious moment and he surprised me with a custom-made gift of polished amber stones set in a magnificent gold setting.”

Benedict had trouble knowing who to look at—Helen, who was speaking, or Nauplius, who was interpreting. He glanced around and saw that the others at the table seemed similarly stricken by uncertainty, and he wondered if they also found it odd to hear Nauplius Brassard praise himself so effusively … in her words. Certainly Brassard looked smug as he spoke.

But Helen gazed at her husband as if she adored him, placed one palm flat on her chest, and with the other spelled, “The memory is engraved on my heart.”

The wide-bellied, rumpled academic nodded and, in an accomplishment Benedict appreciated, at the same time sneered. Dawkins Cipre didn't want to offend Nauplius Brassard, a generous donor to European universities. Yet as a professor of literature he could hardly approve such a romantic gesture; it might reflect badly on his pretentiousness.

Elsa Cipre, the academic's thin, nervous, carefully unmade-up wife and a professor in her own right, said, “Nauplius has studied the inner workings of a woman's heart.”

One of the school teachers rolled her eyes. Another said, “Bless his heart.” Apparently the self-important academics had not impressed anyone.

Then Elsa said, “Dawkins is an expert on classic medieval French romance literature. Perhaps, Helen, for your twenty-eighth birthday he could consult with Nauplius and bring the full weight of French literature to bear.”

Faintly Benedict heard Carmen Mendoza moan under her breath.

Dawkins took the opportunity to launch into a college-level literature lecture in which he cited his years at Oxford and the Sorbonne. His pontificating encouraged low buzzing conversations to start and swell, and Nauplius Brassard flushed with irritation—he did not enjoy losing his place in the spotlight or being told what to do—and tried to interrupt.

Dawkins rambled on, oblivious.

Without asking, the bar staff delivered another round of stiff drinks.

The band came in; the musician played guitar and keyboard, the singer was thin, young, attractive, and handled the microphone with an expertise that spoke of long experience. They began the first set.

Dawkins rattled on until his wife touched his hand and they left to find the dessert buffet.

With a pretty smile, Helen pushed Brassard's drink toward him.

Brassard folded his arms over his chest, transferring his irritation to her.

She tried to sign to her husband, to cajole him into a better mood.

He turned his head away.

When she persisted, he whipped around to face her, caught her wrists, and effectively rendered her mute.

At once she stopped her attempt, and when he released her, she contemplated the champagne in her flute and drank.

An interesting scene, Benedict thought. Helen was Brassard's whipping boy. What kind of greed made a woman put up with that kind of abuse?

Carmen Mendoza began to hum and then to sing in a warm contralto, and in five minutes she had kicked off her shoes and stood before the band, dancing. Before another minute had passed Juan Carlos had taken the female high school teachers onto the floor and the male high school teachers had joined them on the fringes, gyrating sheepishly.

Reginald Bardzecki, the eighty-year-old corporate lawyer, stood and offered his hand to Helen. She glanced at the still fuming Brassard, smiled defiantly, kicked off her shoes, and joined Reginald.

Unlike anyone else on the floor, they danced like experts. He led, she followed, the two of them staging a series of ballroom moves that only two people who loved the music could perform.

The musicians played. The staff and dancers stopped and watched.

Benedict leaned back in his chair and appreciated the sight. Then instinct led him to glance toward the other end of the table.

Nauplius Brassard sat glaring at the elderly man who spun his youthful, smiling wife across the floor.

And Benedict remembered what Abigail had said about Nauplius Brassard:
He is dangerous. We take care never to displease him …
Benedict thought Helen would suffer for her insubordination.

The song ended. The dancers came back to the table, flushed and laughing. They ordered drinks and complimented Reginald and Helen on their skill.

Helen seated herself next to her husband, keeping a few careful inches away from his simmering resentment.

The next song started. Carmen pulled Benedict to the dance floor and taught him flamenco. When he felt he'd made a fool of himself for long enough, Benedict started back toward the table.

The Brassards were gone.

The next morning, a helicopter arrived and lifted Nauplius Brassard and his wife off the ship.

*   *   *

Thirteen months later, Nauplius Brassard died of a brain aneurysm.

His children, all in their forties, moved swiftly to eject his young wife, Helen, from the Brassard Paris home.

They discovered her designer wardrobe, her jewels, and all the furnishings intact. But the fortune Brassard had set aside in her name had vanished—and so had she.

*   *   *

Less than forty-eight hours later, one of Nauplius Brassard's legal team was found murdered during working hours, slashed to death in her office.

The police feared a copycat killer, one imitating the serial killer who, two years before, had died in a Canadian prison.

To their relief, no further murders followed.

 

CHAPTER TWO

In the mountains on Washington's Olympic Peninsula

Officer Rupert Moen steered the speeding patrol car around sharp corners, up steep rises, and through washouts caused by spring rains. Sweat stained his shirt, ruddy blotches lit his cheeks and the middle of his forehead. He was young, a member of the sheriff's department for only a couple of years, shy, and never the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

But damn, put that kid behind the wheel and he could
drive
.

Sheriff Kateri Kwinault's only jobs were to lean with the curves and to keep him calm. In the soothing voice she had perfected during her time as the regional Coast Guard commander, she said, “Four wheels on the ground. All you have to do is keep 'em in sight. We've got a helicopter on its way and every law enforcement officer on the Peninsula moving into position.”

Like a Celtic warrior, Moen was all wild red hair and savage grins. “This road is a real bitch, isn't it?”

“It's … interesting.” Kateri kept her gaze away the almost vertical plunge on her side of the car, away from the equally vertical rise on the other side.

“Goddamn interesting.” Moen harried the black Dodge SRT Hellcat with flashing lights and a blast of the electronic air horn. “This time we'd better catch those bastards.”

“Yes.” The Terrances, father and son, were bastards and worse: drug dealers, meth cookers, jail escapees, drive-by shooters … and murderers.

Kateri corrected herself.
Attempted
murderers. “I hope the roadblock stopped any nonofficial vehicles. We don't want to meet someone in a head-on.”

“Not much traffic up here this spring. Too much runoff. Good thing, considering.”

Considering the width of the road, considering the speed, considering no civilian wanted to encounter John Senior and John Junior.

All the things that made the Olympic Peninsula a hiker's and boater's paradise also made it an ideal hiding place for two fugitives. For three intensive days, the hunt had pulled in county, city, and state police to patrol the roads, and the Coast Guard to cruise the Pacific Ocean and the coastal inlets. After Pauline Nitz had spotted the black Dodge SRT Hellcat speeding along one of the narrow forest roads and called in the report, the chase was on.

Now, spitting gravel and raising dust, Kateri and Moen led the Virtue Falls Police Department in hot pursuit.

Moen's white knuckles gripped the wheel. “Hold on.” He steered them over a series of washboards that rattled everything in the car and made Kateri moan and press her hand to her side. He glanced at her. “Sorry, Sheriff.”

“Not your fault,” she said. Four days ago, while Kateri sat in the window of the Oceanview Caf
é
celebrating her surprise election to the exalted office of sheriff, the Terrances had sprayed bullets through the windows. Their bullet had skipped off her ribs like a flat stone off the rippled surface of a river, leaving her broken and bloody but not seriously wounded.

Instead, they'd put two bullets into Virtue Falls's beloved waitress, busybody, and local wise woman, Rainbow Breezewing, and now she lay in the hospital in a coma, hooked to ventilators and drips. The doctors told Kateri that Rainbow didn't have a chance. They said Rainbow was dying. Dying …

“They're slowing down.” Moen moved closer to the Hellcat's bumper.

“Maybe they're out of gas.” That would be too wonderful—and too lucky, since as far as Kateri could tell, the Terrances had stashed fuel and food in hiding places in the mountains and up and down the coast. “But I don't believe it. Back off.”

Moen sighed but did as he was told.

She leaned forward, watching, trying to figure out what they were up to. “Be care—”

John Terrance, Junior or Senior, goosed the black Dodge SRT and threw it into a skid that sent the car sideways, passenger side toward the pursuers.

“Don't T-bone him!” Kateri shouted.

Moen slipped it into second gear, eased off the gas, and in the excessively patient tone of the very young for the very old (Kateri was thirty-four), he said, “I know what I'm doing, Sheriff.”

The SRT's passenger door flew open. Something tumbled out.

Someone
tumbled out.

Moen screamed, “Shit son of a bitch!”

Kateri yelled, “Don't hit him. Don't run over him!”

Moen mashed on his brakes, skidded.

No way to avoid the collision.

The left tire caught the body. The front of the car went airborne.

“The tree!” Moen shouted.

They rammed it, a giant Douglas fir, square on.

The air bags exploded.

Kateri was slammed against the back of her seat. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't see.
She was drowning.

No. Not drowning. Not again.

She fought the hot white plastic out of her face. The air bag was already deflating … She tore off the sunglasses. White dust covered them, covered the interior of the car. The siren blared. She needed to catch her breath—

Moen looked in the rearview mirror and yelled, “They can't stop. They're going to nail us!”