Triple Exposure (28 page)

But he said, “It’s your mother.”

“Have the police found her? Or was it the sheriff out here?”

“She’s not in Texas, Baby. The man who called—he was from Tulsa, from the medical examiner’s office.”

“I don’t understand. Tulsa?” Marlene’s pulse thundered in her ears. Had authorities discovered the carjacking and her brother’s dead friend? Had they found out about the others, too, about the chain of violent deaths? “Mom left Tulsa weeks ago.”

“No, Marlene, she didn’t. She never left the state of Oklahoma.”

“What are you talking about? Of course she did. I followed her to Albuquerque. I spoke to people who saw her there.”
I saw a man she ran down near a construction site
. Marlene kept this part to herself, still harboring a slim hope that she could get her mother help instead of involving the police. “And you saw her picture from that ATM, remember? The one where you spotted that Jeep Commander in the background.”

“I told you the picture quality was pretty bad, remember? Maybe I thought it was your mother because I was looking for your mother. But it’s impossible, because before that—the police in Tulsa found a body—”

“No, Dan,” Marlene argued. “My mother used her debit card. To get a cash advance. Who else would’ve known her PIN? Not some random stranger wearing her hat.”

“They’ve identified your mother. I’m so sorry, Marlene. There’s no gentle way to say this, but she was found—they found the body stuffed inside a Dumpster near that little motel where she stayed. She—she had a gunshot wound. Through the face, into the brain. The person who called—he said it’s likely death was instant, before she had the chance to feel pain.” He sped on, rattling off another blow before she recovered. “It’s a pretty rough area, and the police are investigating a string of robberies. They think she might have been shot when answering a knock at her room’s door. In past incidents, people have seen two men running away, both of them dressed in pizza delivery uniforms.”

“
No
.” Marlene shook her head, anxiety exploding bright as fireworks in her vision. She had
been to
that old motor court, had questioned the woman at the desk herself. “My mother wouldn’t have opened her door. You know how she was. Ever since my brother’s death, she was so suspicious of people, especially strangers. Besides, this is all impossible. She doesn’t even like pizza. And the woman I talked to at the motel never said anything about any body being found. She told me my mother paid in cash and left the key inside her room when she left.”

“Maybe the body wasn’t found until after you were there. Or the clerk had been warned not to talk about the shootings, since that sort of thing can’t be good for business.”

“Maybe…” Marlene allowed, but she still didn’t believe it. Wouldn’t.

“Did anyone you spoke with actually
see
your mother leave?” Dan asked.

Marlene opened her mouth to blurt
Of course
, but nothing came out. Because the woman she had questioned hadn’t exactly said that. But Marlene had assumed…

“The man you talked to, the medical examiner,” she said, “did you get his name and number? Because I have to call him right now, tell him they have the wrong person. If she was shot in the face, then maybe they couldn’t tell—”

“They waited until they had a match with the dental records before they called us. They wanted to be sure.”

“But what if her—” Marlene sucked in deep breaths, one after another, until she felt light-headed from the rush of oxygen. “—what if this
body’s
teeth were damaged too much? Maybe they made a mistake. An honest mistake. Because that body can’t be my mother.”

“I know this is a shock, Marl. I know and I’m sorry.”

“What—what about my sister? Have you called her?”

“I—uh—I talked to Bryce, but…Did you know they’ve separated again? But this time, Kathy was the one who took off.”

“What?” Marlene’s head was spinning. “When?”

“I don’t know. I guess there was some kind of big to-do at her job. Boss accused her of embezzling. When Bryce tried to talk to her about it, she—”

“That can’t be right. She would’ve told
me
. I spoke to her just—” A terrible suspicion formed in Marlene’s mind. “Are—are you lying to me, Dan? Trying to trick me into coming home? Because if you—”

“Stephanie’s coming to night,” Dan said flatly, referring to his half sister, who lived a hundred miles from their hometown. “She’ll stay with the boys a few days. Because I’m
flying out to get you, Marlene. I’m coming to take you to Tulsa, and then we’ll bring you and your mom both home.”

“But this is wrong. I know it.” Marlene shook her head, as waves of dizziness broke all around her. “Because if I’m not following my mother, what on earth have I spent all this time chasing—some kind of vengeful ghost?”

A dream woke the observer, a nightmare vision of the cramped and filthy hiding place chosen after last night’s run for cover. The evening should have ended with Rachel Copeland gone forever, but instead,
he
had shown up, leaving no choice except to flee, to hide like an animal.

Like the scrabbling, desperate Child from long before.

Though the observer knew last night’s hiding place had been a crawlspace beneath the neighbor’s wraparound porch, its confines reeked of cat piss, a stench too like the kingdom of spiders beneath the long-vanished trailer. (How brightly, how fiercely it had burned once the lights guided The Child to the gas can in the old shed and the matches left there so carelessly. Last night’s fire was no match for it, with no one trapped and screaming in the burning van. No Others cursing, weeping, all but the one innocent dying as they struggled to escape.) And when the wasps swarmed (had they been real this time?) buzzing panic needled skin and soul alike.

Safe this morning, safe
. The thought was as reassuring as the familiarity of the clean bedding in a room kept carefully sanitized, reassuring as the crimson glow of the rising sun beyond the window shade.

Except the sun was drifting. Bobbing. Filling the observer with awe and horror as it bumped behind the shade, flattened itself like a sheet of paper, and slipped sideways to enter the bedroom. Once there, it hovered, recovering its third dimension and changing into salmon, pink, and then a nearly blinding white. The sphere, this sun-on-earth, swelled before giving birth to a host of smaller orbs which fanned out into a horse shoe shape around the bed. Thus arranged, they quivered, faster and faster until the room filled with their hum, their buzz like that of a thousand nests of angry wasps all readying their stingers.

Crying out, the observer raised an arm to ward off the brilliance. But the flashing blazed around that weak impediment and burned through the thin flesh of tight-shut eyelids. Conveyed a message impossible to ignore.

The time of hiding, striking from the shadows and then running from discovery had now ended. Petty mischief intended to isolate and drive the murderer from town would not be tolerated.

This time, this very day, only human blood could serve to slake inhuman hunger. If not, the observer’s blood—all of it—would serve that purpose just as well.

With trembling fingers, Rachel dialed the number she’d been given, her lawyer’s warning still ringing in her ears. “
It
was my responsibility to pass along the message, but I strongly advise
you not to call that woman
,” Marianne Greenberg had told her earlier that morning. “
Sylvia Underwood’s been under a
doctor’s care since her son’s death—and you said yourself you
thought she might have been harassing you. You could end up making
things worse, escalating this instead of helping. Besides, for all
we know, this is a last-ditch effort to bait you into saying something
damaging
.”

Rachel saw her attorney’s point. But if one call could end this lawsuit—if she and her family could be free of courtrooms and civil actions…Hellish as this conversation was sure to be, it couldn’t be ten million dollars’ worth of bad.

She hoped. As her call went through, her heart gave a hard bump in her chest and she wiped a sweaty palm against her jeans. She was glad to be sitting at the kitchen table, for her legs were shaking so hard, she doubted she could stand.

“Hello?” a woman on the other end said. “This is Sylvia.”

A mute pause followed, during which J.D. trotted into the kitchen with one of Rachel’s father’s boots drooping from his jaws.
I should hang up and go get that
, Rachel told herself.
Those are Dad’s best boots, his favorites
….

“Is this—is this Rachel Copeland?”

Kyle’s mother sounded nervous—and utterly unlike the anonymous female caller. Besides, Rachel reminded herself, if Sylvia Underwood had never left Pennsylvania, she couldn’t possibly have called from Marfa, any more than she could have torched Rachel’s van last night.

It must have been someone else. Terri Parton-Zavala’s round face sprang to mind. Could the woman really hate her so much?

“This is Rachel Copeland,” she heard herself saying. “My attorney passed along the message that you wanted me to call.”

“Ms. Copeland.” The woman’s breathing sounded labored, her voice tremulous. “I—I’ve been waiting for this conversation for a long time.”

“You would have waited a lot longer if my attorney had had anything to say about it.”

“I—I understand that. I’ve been blaming you. Blaming you for everything that went wrong. But I know now—I’ve been made to see that making you a scapegoat has accomplished nothing. I’ve only been using you because I—I’ve been so, so furious. Angry with myself, with my son’s doctors and his counselors, with the teachers and the principals and everyone who should have seen this coming. And all that anger—it swelled up so huge inside me, I didn’t know what else to do with it except…”

Put me through nine kinds of hell
, thought Rachel bitterly.
But after a moment, empathy kicked in. Because more than a year after the fact, the anguish in Sylvia Underwood’s voice remained real and raw.

“Those things I said about you,” the woman persisted. “It was wrong of me to do that, especially in public. I wasn’t thinking about how some of my viewers might react. After you started getting phone calls, the police spoke to me about it, but at the time, I wasn’t thinking of anything but my grief.”

“That’s understandable,” said Rachel carefully.

“I just wanted to tell you I regret any pain I may have caused you. If I’d been more myself, perhaps—maybe I could have said something, made some statement, to try to undo the damage. But all I could think about was—” Her breath hitched and quiet sniffles followed. “—All I could see whenever I closed my eyes was your finger on that trigger. Pulling it and ending things forever.”

“I wish none of it had ever happened,” Rachel told her. “There’s not a day that I don’t wish it.”

“Wishing and praying doesn’t make one damned bit of difference. It doesn’t bring my son, my beautiful nineteen-year-old son back, and it doesn’t absolve you or anyone else of one bit of responsibility.”

Wincing under the lash of her fury, Rachel swore under her breath. What on earth had possessed her to ignore her attorney? Could this woman have altered her voice somehow and made the calls, after all? But Rachel had come this far, so she gathered her resolve and tried again. “I don’t presume to compare our losses, but when my grandmother died recently, I was angry, too. At myself, my family, even my grandmother herself for being—for doing something that contributed to her own death.”

There was a long pause during which Rachel entertained visions of a brand-new lawsuit, this one demanding a hundred million dollars and her flayed hide. But finally, the other woman spoke.

“Sometimes I do—I get
so mad
at Kyle, I could
shake
him.” With her admission, Sylvia Underwood’s voice dropped to a broken whisper that collapsed into itself, leaving only the sounds of quiet weeping.

That weeping drew some of the venom from Rachel’s festering fury. “I’m very, very sorry,” she said earnestly, tears hot in her own eyes. “I’ve wanted to say that for a long time. I’m sorry for your loss, and I know—I know you did your best with him. Whatever problems he had—whatever he did to me or anybody—he was—he was still your child. Your boy, and you loved him. And that will never change.”

Sylvia Underwood only cried harder. But after a few minutes, she finally breathed, “My son…yes. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Copeland—”

“It’s Rachel, please.”

“You mean it, don’t you, Rachel? What you told me? Your lawyer didn’t say for you to—”

Rachel’s laugh was dry and hollow, a cicada’s empty husk. “Are you kidding? My lawyer would have kittens if she heard the words ‘I’m sorry’ coming from my lips.”

Sylvia laughed, too, and said,
“Lawyers
… But you’re so right. Kyle’s my child. He always will be. No matter how much it hurts. No matter how sorry I am for—for the things he did to you and those other women.”

“I know,” Rachel whispered, taking Sylvia Underwood’s words as the closest thing to an acknowledgment of her rape that she would ever get. And rolling back the solid stone of anger that was part of her own grief, removing the obstruction from a road that might eventually—with time and work and patience—lead somewhere worth going.

Even though the journey hurt like hell.

By the time Zeke made it to Fort Davis, thirty minutes north of Marfa, his fuel gauge needle was dropping fast toward empty. With a long, desolate stretch between Fort Davis and the next available gas station, he decided he had better fill up.

He knew it was risky, that someone could ask about him
later, and a man his size would likely be remembered, right down to his green eyes. If he had the misfortune of encountering someone who had seen the photo Rachel had taken of him, it would make identification that much quicker. And if Castillo traced him to Fort Davis, he could make a fair guess as to the direction Zeke was taking. Especially if the sheriff managed to match him with the long-missing fugitive, John Charles Langley.

It could happen, Zeke knew. Marlene could have had a change of heart since last night’s warning and decided to involve the law. But if she kept her mouth shut—whether or not she did it to protect her mother—he should get clear of West Texas sometime this afternoon. Afterward, he’d find a place to stay and look for a lawyer. Then arrangements might be made so he could turn himself in somewhere outside of Dogwood, Texas, where it was entirely possible that despite the passage of time, he’d never live to stand trial. Not when his testimony could incriminate the sons of the area’s leading families, sons who, for all Zeke knew, could have remained in the area and claimed power as their birthright.

As he left the office after paying for his gas, his plans changed. There, fueling an old, dark-green Dodge pickup, was a man he recognized from both the airport and the viewing area.

Adrenaline pounding through his system, Zeke took a closer look—trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible—and warned himself to take his time, to be sure. Same brown hair, with a light frost of gray, and thin build, with a narrow, yet oddly familiar face to match. In spite of the hazard from the gas fumes, he held a cigarette in the hand not occupied with the pump. He murmured under his breath, half-singing along with the old Dire Straits tune rolling through the Dodge’s open window. He seemed at ease and unguarded, as though he hadn’t yet seen Zeke.

Zeke crept nearer, trying to keep out of his field of vision. At the moment, the man looked none too dangerous, with the cigarette now dangling loosely from his lips, its
glowing tip bobbing to the beat of “Money for Nothing.” Still, Zeke edged behind him; for all he knew the stranger might be carrying the same gun that he’d fired near the viewing area.

The gas pump clicked, prompting the man to pull the nozzle from the tank and replace it. But as the stranger turned, he spotted Zeke and dropped the nozzle, his eyes flaring with alarm, the lit cigarette dropping far too close to the expanding puddle.

Zeke moved to crush out the burning end before it could ignite the vapors. But his distraction cost him, and his quarry caught him with a round house punch to the chin.

Pain shot upward as his jaws clacked hard together, and Zeke staggered a step backward before recovering. But that was all the time his attacker needed to throw open the truck’s door and dive inside, across the bench seat.

Zeke saw him reach for the glove box, where he must have stashed his weapon. Grabbing the smaller man’s legs, Zeke dragged him back out empty-handed. With a shout of alarm, the struggling man fell from the truck, his skull bouncing against the running board.

Moaning, he stopped fighting, reaching to rub the side of his head and murmur, “Shit, man.”

“Sorry I had to do that,” Zeke said, ignoring the ache of his jaw. “But I need to talk to you, and I didn’t want to get shot for my trouble.”

A shaky female voice blasted through the gas pump’s intercom. “What’s going on out there? I’m calling the law. Have a deputy out here right quick.”

“It’s all right,” Zeke called back toward the speaker. “Just a misunderstanding. It’s over now.”

He helped the man up but kept a firm grip on the shaking hand. Dropping his voice, Zeke added, “Unless you’d rather go to jail than have a little talk with me, you might want to calm the lady’s fears.”

Dark brown eyes looked into Zeke’s and narrowed, a sign the man was weighing options. Or trying to hash out a plan
for his escape. A moment later, a quick nod indicated his agreement.

Speaking loudly for the intercom, the man said, “No. He’s right. We’re okay.”

Moving the hand from his head, he looked down at the smear of blood staining his fingertips and swore. “Damn it. You didn’t have to crack my head half-open.”

“You didn’t have to hit me either. Now give me your truck keys,” Zeke said. After a hesitation, he added, “I just want to be sure you won’t take off, that’s all, or go after your gun. You try either, and I swear, that little bump on your head’s gonna look like a love tap.”

“Fine, okay. You don’t have to freak out on me.”

“You started it, jackass,” Zeke said as he pocketed the keys. “Now I want you to get in my truck so we can discuss this in private.”

“No way, man.” His captive’s look was sullen. “My fucking head is killing me. I need a doctor.”

“You’ll live,” Zeke assured him, “as long as you cooperate, at least. Now get in there and try not to bleed on the upholstery.”