Obsession Falls (35 page)
“That’s the way I look at it. Stay at home and Michael Gracie has a clear shot at you. Go to the party and he hasn’t got a chance.”
“Are you having a prophetic moment?”
“No, I pretty much feel as if both choices suck. It’s just … going to the party sucks less.”
“Then we should go to the costume party.”
* * *
Kennedy finished tinkering with the house alarm, and reset the code. He had made it—not invulnerable, that was impossible—but more secure. Then he looked around for something else to do.
There was nothing. He had spoken to his office, jerry-rigged the Wi-Fi to be impossible to access for any but the most skilled hacker, fixed a broken wire in one of the motion sensors. That left him to pace toward his computer and stare as his identification program flicked through photos of Jimmys-he-had-known and compared them to the official business-face-forward photo of Michael Gracie.
He didn’t need to watch the monitor. But the blue light focused his mind, and right now, his mind needed to be focused. On Summer. And on himself.
In his business, he was known as a master negotiator. So how had he mishandled a marriage proposal so badly? Summer had been livid. And all because he had supposed she enjoyed money and the luxury it brought—after studying her background, that seemed to be a safe assumption.
He had pointed out she could move her business—what difference would it make? He could help her with the start-up.
Most of all, he had speculated on her emotional health. That had made her blow up like a Roman candle. Which made no sense. He thought women wanted to be understood. That’s what they said.
The software program had worked its way through two-thirds of the Jimmys, with an estimated time of twenty hours to get him back through the earlier years of his life, right back to his birth.
Another twenty hours …
Inevitably his mind returned to the problem at hand.
Summer had a skewed sense of what would keep her safe. Certainly, seeing someone shot before her very eyes would scar her, and the fact that Michael Gracie seemed to have a body disposal system in place was disturbing. Yet to attribute omnipotence to Gracie was an exaggeration at best and full-blown paranoia at worst. She should trust Kennedy to keep her safe.
Why didn’t she?
He looked longingly at his computer. Computers, he understood. If only the answers to his questions were there. But from cold, hard experience, he knew they were not. So he did what he always did in situations regarding human emotions.
He called his sister.
* * *
A few hours later, a chastened Kennedy heard a knock at the front door. He stood at once, went to the window and looked out. He expected Girl Scouts selling cookies or grade-school kids selling Christmas wrap. Instead a skinny teenager with a handful of cream-colored cards stood on the porch.
Kennedy opened the door.
“Mr. McManus?”
“Yes?”
“For you.” The kid handed him one of the envelopes, ran down the stairs, and headed toward a new-model Volkswagen Bug. He got in and drove off like a man on a mission.
Kennedy opened the envelope and read the elegant handwriting:
Mr. McManus,
Tomorrow night, I’ll be hosting a Halloween party. I would be delighted to have you attend. The time is eight o’clock. The place is Virtue Falls Resort. Costume required. Don’t be late.
Best,
Margaret Smith
No one knew he was here.
Who was Margaret Smith, and how had she found out he was in town?
He grabbed his tablet off the coffee table and found Margaret Smith and the Virtue Falls Resort right away.
Thank God. He could still do one thing right.
Garik sat in the mostly empty Oceanview Café and watched a blustery wind rip the yellowed leaves off the bigleaf maples and twirl them down the street. The first winter storm was right on schedule, coming onto shore around midnight. It would bring sheets of rain to Virtue Falls, feet of snow to the mountains, and according to the weather service, the temperatures would plunge.
The howling wind, the lashing rain, the threat of lightning, would also give meaningful atmosphere to tonight’s Halloween party … and make everything from setting up to the transportation of guests more difficult. Which is why Garik planned to stay away as long as he could.
“Warm it up, Sheriff?” Rainbow stood over him with the coffeepot and a handful of silverware.
“No, thanks.”
“Okay.” She topped off his cup.
“Um…”
She gestured toward the chair across from him. “Mind if I sit? It’s time for my break, and these dogs are barking.” She tossed down a trivet, put the coffeepot on it, tossed down the silverware, and sat.
He lifted his brows. Now
this
was different. Ever since he could remember, Rainbow Breezewing had waited tables at the Oceanview Café. But also, she was a free spirit, a woman born in Haight-Ashbury to famous hippie artists, a woman known to disappear without a word and return when she pleased. And of course, for all that she had known Garik since he was a kid, and liked him, she did not officially approve of the authoritarian arm of society he represented.
In other words, as far as Rainbow was concerned, he was a cop and not to be trusted. So why was she sitting across from him fidgeting like a guilty child?
“Didn’t pay your parking ticket?” he asked.
“Yeah, I did. Most of ’em.” She leaned forward and looked earnestly into his eyes. “You know I go wander around the hills now and then? Get in touch with Mother Nature, sleep under the stars, get the stench of civilization out of my nose.”
“I know.” For the most part, he believed that was what she was doing.
“Sometimes I stumble on some stuff I shouldn’t know about. But pretty much, I leave well enough alone because I figure if someone’s growing something the state wants to tax, it’s none of my business.”
“Right. Got it.” And if she stopped and smoked a little illegally grown weed, it was none of his business. “Make sure you don’t get shot stumbling onto stuff you shouldn’t know about.”
“Right. Because Virtue Falls needs me at the Oceanview Café.” She looked more serious than he ever remembered. “But this isn’t like that. Remember those bodies dumped in the forest?”
He went on alert. “I wish I could forget them.”
“Any word from the feds about where they come from?”
“No one has a clue.” But he guessed Rainbow was about to give him one.
“Okay, so.” She poked at the silverware. It clattered and skittered across the table. “When those tourists reported that body, I started thinking. A couple of years ago, this couple came in for breakfast. They looked like shit, like they’d been up all night. I heard them talking and I figured out they were pilots.”
“How did you do that?”
“I eavesdropped. Also, I’ve got a thing for pilots, so I know their jargon. These two weren’t in uniform, so I knew they flew private planes, and they were arguing about what was in the locker and whether it was their responsibility to deal with it. They wanted to refuse, but they were … I’d say they were skittish.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, I love me some pilot, so I hooked up with the guy.”
Rainbow
had
figured something out. “Where did they come from?”
Rainbow waggled her finger at him. “Exactly. At the time, I didn’t think about that. Occasionally, they would show up in town. He and I would have some laughs. They’d leave. No big deal. Folks come in and out of here all the time.”
Garik could see where this was going, but before he went to the feds, he wanted to know every detail. “How often did they show up?”
“Erratically. Honest, I didn’t think anything about where they came from or who they were until bodies started falling out of the sky. Even then, it took time to put two and two together. Ya know?” She looked surprised at herself.
“Works that way sometimes.”
Now she got to the meat of the matter. “Do you recall that old airport south of here inside Olympic National Park? Built in World War Two when they thought the Japanese were going to bomb the West Coast?”
Excitement began a slow boil in his veins.
She had nailed it. Rainbow had nailed it.
“About a mile off the main highway? In high school, I used to take girls there. It was quiet and creepy. Abandoned ever since I can remember.”
“In the past, when I was out wandering, I’ve stayed in the building. It was pretty decrepit. I mean, you know, World War Two and all, but if it’s snowing, it’s better than the outdoors.”
“So that’s where you went this time?”
“Right. It still looks abandoned. But man. Those pilots.”
From behind her, one of the regulars yelled, “Hey, Rainbow, how about warming up my coffee?”
Without turning, she acknowledged him with a flip of her middle finger.
Muttering ensued, but nobody had the guts to yell at her again.
“Anyway,” she said, “I went and took a look. At first I thought I was wrong. The building looks as ramshackle as ever. But when I walked along the runway, it had been repaved.”
Garik wanted to grab her and tell her to hurry. But he knew better. The trouble with civilians was that they couldn’t give a straightforward report, and interrupting them either made them forget details or they started over. He couldn’t afford either delay.
Rainbow continued, “I figured it was one of two things. Either it was the government—it’s still their airport, at least as far as I know, and they’re always doing some dumbass surreptitious thing to spy on us.”
“Hmm. Yes.” Rainbow was convinced the government was out to get them.
She continued, “Or it was our body-dumpers.”
He couldn’t resist. He had to ask. “You don’t think the government is dumping bodies in the forest?”
“No. They have a facility in Utah where they incinerate the people they want to disappear.”
He shouldn’t have asked.
“I set up camp, out of sight, and I waited. Sure enough, one night this private jet drops out of the sky so fast it looked like someone had shot it down.” Right there under the fluorescent lights of the Oceanview Café, Rainbow pulled off her shirt and showed him her ribs. “See that? That’s where the bullet grazed me.”
He supposed he should be glad the restaurant was relatively empty. He supposed he should be glad Washington State was so casual about nudity. He
was
glad when she put the shirt back on.
People were staring. Listening.
He did not need them to hear this. He leaned forward and spoke softly. “So not the government.”
“Probably not,” she admitted grudgingly.
“They shot you. How did they see you?”
“
He
shot me. I got a little too careless about whether anyone could spot me from above, and that man who came in on the plane—he was a sharp bastard.” As Rainbow remembered, her eyes narrowed. “He got off the plane looking like a model from
Gentleman’s Quarterly.
Hands in the pockets, posed and glamorous. He talked to his buddies. I was watching. Then all of a sudden, the lights went out. A spotlight lit up the trees around me. I took off running. Bullets sprayed all around.” She sighed. “I lost my camping gear.”
Not the point.
“You’re goddamn alive!” Elizabeth would kill him if anything happened to Rainbow. Hell, half the town would eat his liver if anything happened to Rainbow. And if Rainbow was hurt, he wouldn’t be too happy about it, either. “So they’re bringing passengers and bodies in on a plane. The passengers, probably criminals moving around the country surreptitiously, are dispersing in the state. The bodies, they’re loading onto helicopters and dropping in the forest.”
“I think that about covers it.”
He started making plans. He would call Tom Perez, his old boss at the FBI, and give him a heads-up. Go to the airport and check it out for himself. In no time, he would have solved the crimes surrounding bodies that dropped from the skies, and nailed this glamorous murderer who remodeled decrepit airports and shot at civilians who happened to be Garik’s friends.
“I spent two miserable days taking the long way around to the road and back to Virtue Falls.” Rainbow’s mouth scrunched in disgust. “I had wondered where she came from.”
The change of subject almost gave Garik whiplash. “Who?”
“Summer Leigh. She showed up, this mystery woman. She didn’t talk like one of us, she was in shit shape, and she was scared out of her mind. She got on her feet, started a business, charmed some old guy out of his car … she’s a mover and a shaker. But she’s still scared out of her mind.”
“You think she was a body to be dumped.”
“Only she was still alive. And whoever this guy is, he’s still after her.”
That night, the night of the party, Summer turned off the dark coastal highway into Virtue Falls Resort’s parking lot. She rolled down her window, showed the attendant the party invitations, and nodded as she listened to him instruct her where to park. Then she ignored every word and drove to the darkest corner of the asphalt. There she wedged her car in between a Hummer limousine and a Volkswagen Bug.
Kateri pretended she didn’t know why Summer hid her car from easy view. No use having someone else sabotage the car on purpose. They might need it for a quick getaway.
Summer killed the engine. “Parking lot’s almost full. This joint is jumping.”
The two of them exchanged looks.
“Do you think
he’s
here?” Kateri asked.