The Timer Game (23 page)

But only in his time. His rules. His truth.

And what would be forged in that moment of comprehension between the two of them? Even in the best-case-scenario—and there couldn’t be any other, she wouldn’t permit it—even when she swept Katie into her arms and held her and all the Bad Things were gone, would the last Bad Thing still be there, lodged deep, leaking poison?

Would it always be there? Would he?

It was the dark dance of accommodation for survival. She was letting him in. Because she had no choice. And in that humiliating immediacy she was showing him more, baring more of herself, drawing closer to him than she’d ever been to anyone.

Grace had always understood the mechanics of fear, every woman did: the darkened parking garage, the click of a lock in an empty hall, the moment on a street when the energy shifted and a woman knew with certainty things had slid irrevocably from safe to not safe.

They were fragile, those walls, easily breached, and the Spikeman had found the perfect way in. He had stolen Katie, and Grace raised her arms above her head and walked to him willingly. Endured his games. Played along.

She felt like a whore. She felt like a mother. The only thing worse than what he was doing with her was what he could be doing to Katie. She felt overwhelmed with tiredness and fear.

Where was Katie, this night? Had her daughter slipped into exhausted sleep? And who would hold Katie when she cried?

Grace closed the window sheers and spread the charts and a legal pad out on the table. She started a pot of coffee and thought about it. Robert Harling Freize’s story was one of four. Was she supposed to track the others?

She felt hollowed out. She hadn’t eaten all day except for a bite of toast midmorning. She wondered if there were any messages on her home phone, but if she called and used her code to hear them, Warren’s team would track her right to the Century Plaza.

Dump the PI and his pals or she dies.

She called Jeanne. It was after eleven at night but her AA sponsor picked up on the second ring, her voice strained.

“It’s me.”

“Have you found her?”

“No.” She explained what she needed and got off the line. The coffee was ready and she poured a cup and stared sightlessly at the sheers. The streetlights were soft blotches of red and blue against the fabric. She waited five minutes and called back.

“Six messages from reporters, all wanting to rehash the shooting. Want their names?”

“Was one of them named Mac?”

Jeanne checked the list. “Mac. Mac. There’s a Mallory,” she said finally. “That’s about the closest.”

“Anything else?”

“Your buddy in the crime lab, Paul Collins. Wants to know what in the hell you meant when you said, ‘Katie’s in trouble.’ Also he found a palm print on the taco van.” She recited the rest of the message and Grace wrote down:
Print doesn’t match AFIS files; going to have to search the old way, one palm print at a time.

“Anything else?” The sharp sound of Helix barking came through the phone line.

“Helix, hush. A couple more things. Marcie called, said to call her on her private line at work or on her cell, she has news about the wrapping paper that doll came in and—
hush! Helix! I mean it.
Sorry, and let’s see, oh yeah, and a call from somebody who identified himself as Oscar, Dusty’s dad. It’s about that drawing Katie sent. He sounded really broken up, but didn’t want to leave a message on the phone, just wants you to call him when you can.”

Except I can’t, Grace thought tiredly. Annie and Oscar’s number was in her address book at home and she couldn’t go back there now, it was too risky. She had no idea if Warren had left somebody there when she’d disappeared. She’d forgotten all about the pen pal letter Katie had written to Dusty. It all seemed pointless and far away and infinitely valuable. She wished she could see the drawing again, the smudges and erasers, Katie’s scrawling signature, hold it close.

The barking continued and Jeanne said, “Shit. Gotta go. Somebody’s pounding on the door.” Her footsteps retreated and returned almost immediately.

“Grace.” It was a rumbly, pissed-off male voice she recognized immediately.

“Bill. My favorite PI.” Of course they’d tracked Jeanne immediately after Jeanne had called Grace’s line and retrieved her phone messages. Grace hadn’t thought that through.

“Where in the hell are you?”

“I can’t tell you that.” Her hand tightened around the phone.

“You never came out of the postal annex so I went in. You were gone.”

“Put on Jeanne again, okay?”

“I’m not done with you.”

“Just please—”

He passed the phone to Jeanne. She sounded subdued.

“Don’t tell them anything, understand?”

“I don’t know anything!”

That was true. Grace realized she hadn’t told Jeanne where she was. “This is important. Click off and dial a number.”

“Which?”

“Any number! It doesn’t matter! I don’t want them star sixty-nineing your phone and tracking me down. If I need to reach you, I’ll call your cell. Do it now!”

Jeanne took a ragged breath and hung up. Grace looked around the room.

Safe to not safe.

Any PI worth his license could find her. She had to leave. Now. Before Bill drove up from San Diego, or worse, hired some Los Angeles PI she’d never met to sit in the lobby behind a magazine and track the spoor of her fear when she left. She’d been so relieved to get Warren Pendrell involved, but he’d looped in the private investigator, and now that involvement could cost her Katie.

She scrabbled up her things, remembering right before the door slammed shut that she’d left the timer on the nightstand and raced back for it, her throat dry. A pianist sat at the baby grand piano, playing something moody with one hand and drinking from a tumbler with the other. A relaxed group of revelers all dressed as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, clumped around the bar, their lips slashed in purple, and she could feel eyes on her as she crossed the lobby.

Her teeth were chattering by the time she reached the door.

A fog had floated in and the moist air chilled her to the bone. The valets looked perfectly right on this night before Halloween, dressed in uniforms that reminded her of guests at Alice’s tea party, gilded and braided in knickers and rounded hats. She sat on the stone bench as they brought the car around, the cold seeping through her pants.

She had no doubt the Spikeman would find her. Her only goal was to let him know she’d followed the rules. She drove aimlessly and found a hotel on Fairfax across from CBS called Farmer’s Daughter. Her room was on the third floor, small and clean with a silhouette on the door that looked like Barbie with braids, jauntily holding a watering can.

She made another pot of coffee and worked on her notes for almost an hour. She rubbed her forehead. A tight knot banded her back, right under her left shoulder blade, from tensing over the desk, hunching over the wheel of the car, pushing on to the next thing, hoping against hope the next clue would lead her to Katie.

The legal pad was covered with scribbled notes and she smoothed the top page, as if her hand could somehow free the words and send them skittering briskly into some recognizable solution. Something she’d missed. Exhaustion tugged her down into a cottony wave and she knew she’d soon be yanked hard into sleep, despite her efforts to stay awake.

“Did you ever do anything wrong, Mommy?” The voice was so pure, so clear in her mind, it was as if Katie were still there, next to her. Katie had asked her that a few nights before, when Grace was tucking her in.

It had caught Grace by surprise and then she realized what Katie needed. “A million things, Katie, but the rightest thing I ever did was having you.”

She stroked her daughter’s hair. Katie stared back, eyes grave, waiting for the rest, the set piece, the thing they always did, reestablishing connection.

“Because you, Katie.” It was a whisper. “You are my—”

“Heart,” Katie finished.

Grace knew then what the note meant.

All Hallows’ Eve you’ll play a part.

Ere midnight tolls, I cut your heart.

It was Katie. It was all about Katie.

Katie
was
her heart, and if Grace couldn’t save her, it would core Grace’s heart as cleanly as if the Spikeman had used a knife.

She stared at her notes sightlessly. She couldn’t do this anymore. Not by herself.

Her mind roiled with images and a wave of helplessness washed over her. She felt utterly unable to act. She wanted decisions to be taken out of her hands, she wanted it not to be up to her to determine what happened, to save Katie.

She was going to have to make that call.

Chapter 25

All Hallows’ Eve, 12:08 a.m.

She wouldn’t use the phone in the room and or the cell phone in her bag the Spikeman had provided. She waited until after midnight to take the elevator down. She’d slid past exhaustion into a shattered sense of floating. There was a pay phone in an alcove near the lobby but it wouldn’t give her the privacy she needed, and she kept moving.

Across the street from the hotel, a ghostly line had formed in front of the CBS building, everybody in costume. A game show, she suddenly thought. They’re lined up for
The Price Is Right.
That small, homely desire for fame, however fleeting, cheered her like a faint message from a cooling planet. There was life somewhere else, no matter how distant and foreign, and she would find it again.

Light and laughter spilled from the Tart Restaurant next door but she turned away from it, toward Beverly Boulevard. She shifted her bag. The charts were too important to leave in the room but they were bulky companions on a walk.

She stopped walking. It didn’t matter what phone she used. He could track her. He knew exactly where she was that instant because he’d planted something.

It was either in the charts or in the cell phone. Audio bugs, an activated GPS, something. Charts were the easiest; he must have known she’d take them everywhere she went, they were the only clear link she had to Katie. She was going to have to look at everything, the rental car, the phone. He had to be tracking her right that minute, a green pulsing dot of energy.

What had Paul Collins said when she’d inspected the taco van?
Eddie Loud was wired… a video cam attached to his shirt button
. Put there by the Spikeman. The Spikeman knew electronics.

An all-night diner on Beverly was tucked into a row of darkened shops, and she hurried toward it. She found a booth at the back, ordered vegetable soup and milk, and took out the charts and yellow notepad. The dislocating thing, the thing that unnerved her the most, was that she worked in an environment where everything that was happening to her was absolutely credible, where creepy sociopaths were real, and where it was abundantly clear that bad people targeted good ones, sometimes just for the sheer kick of causing pain.

She hadn’t had time to figure out who was after her and why, and now she thought back over her career in the crime lab and wondered about the doers she’d helped convict and what had happened to them. It seemed a long line of foul-smelling, crumbly toothed meth addicts, interspersed with murderous boyfriends wielding knives and clubs and guns, avaricious employees fearing discovery, furious ex-wives and greedy girlfriends. Nobody popped out.

She shook her head and flung down her pencil, frustrated. It rolled against the charts and caught the edge of the metal clasp on Katie’s chart, and Grace examined it as carefully as if she were blind.

A dot no bigger than a pencil point had been attached to the underside of the clasp. Grace remembered a gag gift Paul Collins had given her last birthday, and she rooted through her bag, hoping she still had it. She found it tucked in a zippered pocket, a magnifying glass, and she wiped it clean on the hem of her shirt and studied the dot. Under the magnifying glass, a world of microscopic coils leaped out at her. A GPS device, embedded in the one chart the Spikeman knew she’d never leave behind.

She checked the rest of Katie’s chart and found nothing. The waitress came with food and Grace pushed everything out of the way.

“You a lawyer?” The waitress glanced at the charts as she put down the steaming bowl of minestrone and placed two packets of Saltines and a glass of milk on the table. “‘Cause I got this custody thing.”

Grace shook her head.

The waitress shot her a long, measured look of suffering, her eyes flinty.

“Sorry,” Grace said. She meant it.

The waitress whirled and fled back to the kitchen. Grace ate the soup and crackers and ordered coffee. It took her another hour, going page by page, before she found it. The metal clasp on the Wingers’ chart was slightly thicker and a different color, a deeper silver. Under the magnifying glass, she discovered the thin veneer of plastic coated a delicate tracery of wires. She studied it, knowing she’d seen one like it somewhere before. She drank a second cup of coffee and rechecked the charts and found nothing else. If the first thing she’d found—the dot on the underside of the clasp on Katie’s chart—was a GPS, and she was pretty certain it was, then maybe the second thing was an audio bug.

Tracking her. Listening. If he’d gone to that amount of trouble to hear her and track her movements on a grid, it had to mean he wasn’t visually spying on her. Not in person. There’d be no need. It gave her a small crack of opportunity, if she could figure out how to use it.

By the time she’d paid her bill she’d thought of the first step.

Chapter 26

All Hallows’ Eve, 2:44 a.m.

There was a pay phone at the Chevron gas station on the corner of Beverly and Fairfax, and she pulled coins out of her pocket and dialed the number from memory. She’d gone back to the room and put on the Cleopatra wig and heavy makeup, joining a boisterous group of partiers as they stumbled down the stairs singing college fight songs. She couldn’t risk the night clerk identifying her. She needed to be safely upstairs in her room, tucked in for the night.