In Close (16 page)

By the time he put the receiver down, he was breathing hard. He didn’t want Isaac to be shot, to have his brains all over the wall Jeremy had just cleaned, but…he wouldn’t think of that. It would all be over soon. Then Isaac would be buried and he wouldn’t have to worry about anything anymore. Jeremy had no choice. He had to leave
now.
Claire would get over Isaac. Once she understood that Isaac was dead, she’d have to get over him just like she’d gotten over David.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be your sweetheart,” he whispered.

The thought of finally touching her, of kissing her with his mouth open like Isaac, made Jeremy’s whole body tingle.

He’d only been able to dream about kissing her in the past. Now it would be real. And they’d be together forever.

He wouldn’t let her leave him like his parents had.

Claire sat up straight, feeling as if she’d been wide-awake all along. She heard a noise at the door, thought maybe it was Isaac. Even while she slept she’d worried about him, kept dreaming that he was in a car chase or a gunfight or lay bleeding somewhere and she couldn’t get to him.

“Isaac?” She was so eager to have him back with her, she got up and went to the door, although she knew he’d taken a key card.

“It’s me.” Jeremy. She frowned as she recognized his voice and peeked through the peephole to see a somewhat distorted view of his head.

What did he need
now?
He’d had such a hard time going to his own room when Isaac left. He hadn’t wanted to be alone, but Isaac wouldn’t let him stay in their room, and she was glad. He was acting so strange; it was starting to creep her out. The way he stared at her, how quickly he agreed with anything she said, how loudly he laughed at any joke, no matter how lame, she could usually tolerate. But something had changed…?. Still, Alana and Roni, as well as her father, had warned her not to mistreat him, even when she didn’t want him following her around, and she heard their voices in her head now. His life was hard enough, especially with some of the other kids’ cruelty. She didn’t want to be unkind.

“What is it you need?” she called back.

“Can I come in? I—I can’t sleep. My father’s dead. I know it. He’s buried under the house. There was blood. Everywhere.”

“He’s buried
where?
” That part sounded a little too definite for comfort. What would make Jeremy say something like that?

“Right next to your mother. I’ll tell you where she is if you’ll let me in.”

No way could Jeremy know what he was talking about. It was pathetic how far he’d go to avoid being alone.

Claire rubbed her face while trying to decide what to do. She didn’t want him to disturb any of their neighbors by continuing to knock on her door. She was afraid the manager would come down to shoo him away. Then what would she do? She’d have to take him in because she was pretty sure Jeremy wouldn’t be able to handle that, and she felt responsible for him.

“Look, Jeremy, I’m tired. I understand you want to help me, and I want to help you, too. We’re friends. But you can’t tell me where my mother is because you don’t know.”

“Yes, I do. I swear. She’s in a suitcase under the house. My father killed her.”

If not for the mention of the suitcase, Claire might’ve passed this off as a fanciful invention. That a piece of luggage had gone missing from the house the same day as her mother wasn’t one of those details the police had kept under tight wraps, but Jeremy was talking about an incident that’d happened fifteen years ago. How come he remembered the suitcase?

A chill went through her as she envisioned what he’d told her. She didn’t like what he was doing to get her to open the door, but she couldn’t hold it against him, either. He was frightened and desperate and probably had no clue how hard it was for her to hear things like this, how gruesome imagining her mother’s body in a suitcase would be.

On second thought, it wasn’t all that surprising he’d remember the suitcase. He had an incredible memory for odd facts, unusual details, numbers. He never had to write down a phone number. He could rattle off any one he’d ever called, even if he’d only dialed it once. The kids at school used to jabber off a bunch of numbers just to see if they could stump him.

“Claire?” He knocked again. “Did you hear me?”

“I heard you.” She just didn’t know how to respond.

“Do you believe in zombies?” he asked.

“No, Jeremy. I don’t. There’s no such thing.” This confirmed it. He was completely out of touch with reality.

“I’m afraid my mom and your dad are going to come alive and—and hurt me if I don’t take care of you. I promised your mother I’d keep you safe. Did you know that?”

“No, but it’s…sweet.”
In a revolting sort of way…

“So will you let me in?”

She rested her head against the door. “Jeremy, I was asleep…?.”

“Please? I don’t like it out here.”

“Can’t you just go back to your room?”

“No, there are zombies in my room!”

“Oh, God,” she muttered to herself, but she pulled on her jeans under the T-shirt she’d worn to bed and opened the door.

Jeremy stood in the puddle of blue light shed by the energy-conservation bulb in the fixture closest to her door, looking even more distraught than when he’d gone into his room fifteen or twenty minutes earlier. He’d really worked himself up.

Claire felt sorry for him, but with Isaac gone she might still have insisted he go back to bed. His babbling unnerved her, even if he didn’t know what he was saying.
He
unnerved her. But there were tears running down his cheeks, and the memory of how she’d felt in the days following her mother’s disappearance wouldn’t allow her to be that hard-hearted. At least she’d had her stepfather to rely on. If Jeremy’s dad was really gone, and he wasn’t coming back, Jeremy would have no one.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “Come on. You can sleep in the other bed while we wait for Isaac.”

He stepped forward as if he’d brush past her but grabbed hold of her instead. “Jeremy, don’t—”

Clamping a hand over her mouth, he pushed her to the ground.

Claire struggled, but he was freakishly strong. She’d just begun to realize he wasn’t joking, that he wouldn’t stop this unless she
made
him understand he had to let her go, when he leaned in close.

“Don’t scream,” he whispered in her ear. “Please, don’t scream. I don’t want to have to shoot you. I love you, Claire. I’ve always loved you.”

That was when she felt the hard muzzle of a gun between her shoulder blades.

29

T
he drive went by fast, probably because Isaac was no longer tired. He was too busy considering what might’ve happened to Don. Even though he was already expecting the worst, what he found when he arrived still surprised him.

The door was unlocked, and he didn’t have to step all the way across the threshold to smell the bleach. Jeremy had been right. A “cleaning smell” pervaded the whole house. And the couch and a big section of carpet were damp—again, just like Jeremy had said.

The odd thing was the bullet hole. It wasn’t anywhere near the place where the violence seemed to have occurred; it was on the opposite wall.

“What the hell happened here?” Isaac muttered.

Maybe Don had some dangerous company and attempted to defend himself. If so, he was either a terrible shot or he was drunk.

More likely he was drunk…?.

“Poor bastard.” Isaac felt as sorry for him as he did Jeremy. Don hadn’t had an easy life, either.

Myles checked the garage. Don’s Jeep was parked inside it. So where was he?

The evidence suggested he might be dead. Or hurt. It didn’t look good. Isaac needed to get out as soon as possible and call 9-1-1. But first he wanted to go through Don’s phone records to see who he’d been calling and if any of those calls corresponded to a number associated with Les Weaver. He also wanted to find Don’s bank statements. If Don had been hired to trash Claire’s place, maybe there’d be a corresponding deposit Isaac’s P.I. could trace back to the source.

It took nearly an hour for Isaac to come to terms with what he’d begun to suspect shortly after he started searching—he wasn’t going to find much in the way of documentation in Don Salter’s house, certainly not
paid
bills. The man didn’t have a filing cabinet, didn’t seem to keep any records at all. Isaac couldn’t find a single bank statement.

He did come across a big stack of outstanding bills shoved into a kitchen drawer, however. Most were overdue. And right there, near the bottom, he found Don’s most recent telephone bill, which showed several calls to Coeur d’Alene in Idaho. “
That’s
what I want.”

Feeling he was finally getting somewhere, Isaac grabbed a dish towel to pick up the phone, so he wouldn’t leave any prints. He wanted to see where the Idaho number went, see if Les Weaver answered. If Les was used to accepting calls from Don’s house, he’d recognize the number on caller ID and might pick up, despite—

But before Isaac could dial, he heard a noise that made him freeze.

Someone had just come through the front door.

Claire couldn’t feel her hands or her feet. Jeremy had ripped out the cords of the lamps in her motel room and used them to tie her up until he could get some rope from his car. Then he’d used that instead. He’d gagged her, too, with a strip of fabric he tore from the motel sheets. He said he couldn’t think with her begging him to let her go. He also said she’d be happy he’d done this in the end.

She couldn’t imagine that. But without the use of her limbs, or even her mouth, she couldn’t get free. Her wrists were already raw from trying. She wasn’t sure where he’d gotten the rope but it was the worst kind, so scratchy it hurt even before she’d rubbed the skin away. At this point, the slightest movement brought pain. There was nothing she could do except lie on the backseat of his car in a sideways crouch with her cheek pressed against the fabric of his seat, which smelled like dirty socks. She tried to brace herself against the jostling of the car, but even that became impossible once he turned off the highway.

The suspension in his old car wasn’t the best for such rough terrain. The vehicle bounced as he drove through potholes and rocks and ruts. He seemed to be taking her up into the mountains on one of the many fire roads that led to remote hunting or fishing destinations. She couldn’t tell if he’d chosen it at random or he’d been here before, but he rarely left home so she doubted he knew what he was doing or where he was going. She also had no idea how anyone would ever find her out here—or how, if she managed to get free, she’d reach the highway.

As the minutes dragged on, tears slipped from her eyes, but they weren’t tears of sadness or fear as much as anger and frustration. She’d tried to be so good to Jeremy. For years she’d put up with him and endured the teasing his devotion had inspired among her friends, the discomfort of his inappropriate remarks, the awkwardness of his constant and invasive staring, the lecturing from her parents about the less fortunate. And
this
was how he repaid her?

“I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said at length.

He was crazy. She was beginning to understand
how
crazy. She’d thought he was just slow and rather sweet. Someone who’d always been bullied. That was the whole reason she’d been willing to tolerate him. But he’d been telling her how his father had shot himself the night of the fire, and instead of calling the police, he washed the blood and brains off the wall and buried him under the house.

She didn’t know whether or not to believe him, especially when he insisted that her mother was down there, too. How could that be? Jeremy claimed his father had murdered her, but Don Salter had no connection to her mother. Except for the fact that he was seen burning the files, and the fact that Don had once been her father’s friend.

If what Jeremy said was true, Tug had to be behind her mother’s death.

She wanted to ask for details, proof, but she couldn’t even talk.

“You believe me, don’t you?” he asked.

He sounded childlike again. Harmless. And that made her angriest of all. He’d taken everyone in—everyone but his own father, perhaps. She now realized that the whole town had probably misjudged Don, at least when it came to his son. It was a miracle that he’d cared for Jeremy all those years. They’d all been so afraid Jeremy would end up in a sanatorium, but she was pretty sure that was exactly where he belonged.

He slowed to a stop, but she got the impression that they hadn’t yet reached their destination. “You can grunt if you believe me.”

She did nothing. She was beginning to hate him. If he’d known where her mother was all these years, why hadn’t he told someone? Maybe he wasn’t the smartest person in town, but he’d been fully aware of how long she’d been searching for the truth and how much it would mean to her to finally know. He’d mentioned the situation quite often.

I hope you find her, Claire…
?. He used to say that all the time. If he loved her like he claimed, why hadn’t he taken pity on her and told her the truth years ago?

“You’re not being very nice,” he said when she maintained her silence.

That statement alone proved he was unbalanced.
She
wasn’t being nice?

He started driving again, but slowly. He was obviously more interested in talking to her. “I hope you’re not mad. You’ll be fine. I don’t want you to worry. I’m going to take care of you. Just like David did.”

He didn’t have the ability to take care of anyone, even himself. But that wasn’t what she focused on. She was thinking about David. She had so many questions. If Don had killed her mother, was he also the one who’d hired Les Weaver to shoot David? Or had Tug handled that?

Fresh tears slipped from Claire’s eyes.
Dad, could you really have done this to me? Taken away two of the most important people in my life?

Her heart said no. But everything else said yes. It had to be him or Roni. Jeremy had told her they’d been seeing each other well before her mother went missing, just as April had said. He’d been watching her for so long, he knew almost as much about her family as he did about her. Isaac believed her stepfather was behind it; she could tell by the way he’d approached their talk about forgiveness.

Dad, how could you?
Those words went through her mind again and again, but she supposed that anyone who’d had a loved one do something like this felt the same. As horrible and unfair and unthinkable as it was, it happened. There was no way of understanding it. There was only the bitter taste of betrayal—by Tug, the man she’d accepted as her father, and by Jeremy, the boy she’d stood up for all her life.

Soon the jostling took its toll. Her body ached from being unable to change positions. Her head pounded from lack of sleep, a surfeit of emotion and the gag cutting into her jaw. Yet Jeremy drove on.

Did he even know where he was going? Did he have any kind of plan?

He’d said his father had killed himself. Was that true, or had Jeremy shot him? He had a gun…?.

Either way, Jeremy had nothing to go back to. No family, no friends. After this he wouldn’t even have his job at Hank’s.

So what could he have in mind? They couldn’t survive out here, not for any length of time. She doubted they had enough food or water for twenty-four hours. They hadn’t stopped anywhere; nothing was open this late. And she wasn’t sure Jeremy had come prepared.

Maybe survival
wasn’t
what he had in mind. Maybe he only wanted to escape the consequences of what he’d done long enough to spend some time with her, after which he might let her go.

Or he might kill himself and take her with him.

“Isaac?”

Isaac released his breath and stuck his gun back in his waistband. He’d been sure it was Les Weaver, coming to finish what he’d failed to do when he started the fire. But this was a much more familiar voice. It didn’t belong to someone he particularly liked, but running into a man he didn’t like was better than running into a contract killer. “In here.”

Rusty Clegg came around the corner and eyed him from head to foot.

Isaac didn’t appreciate his condescending expression. “Did you have something you wanted to say to me?”

“I thought that was your truck parked off in the trees.” He clicked his tongue as he shook his head. “You just don’t know how to stay out of trouble, do ya?”

“Excuse me?”

He hooked his thumbs in his utility belt and puffed out his chest—to show off the badge on his uniform or make himself seem bigger and tougher, or both. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Probably the same thing you are. I’m looking for Don.”

“By going through his stuff?”

“I’m hoping to find something that can tell me why he hasn’t been seen for two days. And whether or not he’s had contact with someone in Idaho.”

“That’s not your place! You’re not a deputy!”

Isaac raised his eyebrows. “Maybe if you were doing your job I wouldn’t have to be doing it for you.”

His eyes glittered. “You could be arrested for interfering with a police investigation.”

“Last I heard, this wasn’t an official investigation.”

“But if Don’s missing—”

Isaac broke in. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Don’s not just missing,
Deputy
Clegg. He’s
dead.
”

This took him aback, wiped the contempt from his face. “How do you know?”

“Let’s call it an educated guess. First of all, Jeremy’s freaking out because he hasn’t seen his father for two days. Don’s never taken off like this before, especially when his car is in the garage. There’s a bullet hole in the wall out there—” he gestured toward the living room “—and a big wet spot on the carpet, where someone used a hell of a lot of bleach.”

“That’s not like finding a body,” he argued.

Isaac propped his hands on his hips. “It’s enough that someone should start looking for one.”

What was left of Rusty’s bravado disappeared and his shoulders slumped. “But…who would want to kill Don?”

“Someone convinced he knows too much. Someone who saw him as a weak link.”

“Based on your theory that Les Weaver shot David on purpose.”

“He did. And I’m going to prove it.”

“Shit.” He ran three fingers over the distress lines in his forehead. “I was there. I was with him. It seemed legit. Weaver was
so
upset.” A little of his former belligerence returned. “And there was no motive. Weaver was a total stranger, an upstanding citizen from out of state. You wouldn’t have suspected anything, either!”

“That ‘upstanding citizen’ has ties to the Lucchese family.”

“Who the hell is that?”

“One of the most powerful organized crime syndicates in New York City.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked Myles to check. It was that simple.” Heck, even Leland Faust had an uncomfortable feeling about how smoothly that day’s events had been explained and accepted. If Rusty hadn’t taken the easy road, the one Les Weaver had paved for him with his good looks, charity work and attorney trappings, the truth might’ve come out a year ago. And if that had happened, maybe Isaac’s house wouldn’t be in ashes. “I’ve got to be honest with you, Rusty. You should’ve asked a few more questions.”

Crimson suffused the deputy’s face as his lips pulled back to show his teeth. “You’re so full of bullshit, standing there like you know everything. Big Isaac, who swoops in at the last minute to steal
my
girl.”

So it wasn’t all about Les or David. “
Your
girl? Claire’s never been yours.” In one way or another, she’d always been
his
—she’d known it and he’d known it—even when she was with David.

“Without your interference, she might’ve been. She asked me out last week. That was a start. Then
you
got involved.”

“She wasn’t really interested in you, Rusty. She just wanted to get out.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know shit. And you have no proof Les killed David on purpose. You’re just trying to make me look bad so you look better.” With that he left the kitchen and started going from room to room, calling for Don and Jeremy.

“Jeremy’s with Claire in Libby. So don’t waste your breath yelling for him,” Isaac said. And if Don was home Isaac would already know it, but…Rusty didn’t respond.

Isaac listened as the deputy marched upstairs; when he came back and headed down to the basement, Isaac followed.

“Are you satisfied yet?” he asked when Rusty stood staring at Jeremy’s empty room.

Again, he didn’t answer. He was gaping at a wall covered in pictures of Claire and embellished with poems and dried flowers and drawings of hearts. “What the hell is this?”