3 Swift Run (29 page)

“Oh, all right, if you want to be a bleeding heart about it.”

Together we rolled Dreiser into the guest room and then sat back on our haunches,
panting. Securing a prisoner was hard work. “We need to tape his mouth.” Les returned
to the hallway for the duct tape, and Dreiser immediately started in on me.

“You don’t want to do this, Gigi. Kidnapping is a federal crime, a felony! It won’t
be Les the cops nab, because he’ll be in Guadalumbia or some place. It’ll be you.
If you let me go right now—”

“Shut it,” Les said, coming in in time to hear the last bit. He slapped tape over
Dreiser’s mouth. “There. The cops won’t be arresting anyone except you, Dreiser, when
Gigi calls them and tells them you broke in and threatened her with a knife. Come
on, Gigi.” He pulled me out of the room while Dreiser mumbled angrily behind the tape.

“He can breathe, can’t he?” I asked, giving a worried glance over my shoulder as Les
shut the door.

“Of course he can.”

I felt a hot flash coming on and flapped the hem of my sweater. I’d have pulled it
off except I knew Les would misinterpret.

Kendall’s voice floated down the stairway again. “Mom, did you die down there?” She
sounded irritated at the idea. “You didn’t, like, have a heart attack or anything,
did you?”

“Coming, sweetheart,” I called back. I gave Les a flustered look. “You can’t come
up,” I said. “I don’t think the kids should be involved.” Could minors be charged
with harboring a fugitive? I didn’t want to find out.

“I’ve got to meet someone,” Les said. “A guy who can help me. Get me the Hummer keys,
will you?”

“Dexter’s shoveling the driveway.”

“I’m not going now! I’ll watch TV or something until it’s dark.”

Biting my lip with indecision, not quite sure how I ended up with my fugitive ex-husband
and a prisoner in my basement, I slowly climbed the stairs.

35

Refreshed by another shower and a change of clothes, Charlie climbed into her Subaru
to return to the office. It was good to have the steering wheel beneath her hands
again; being driven around by Dan or Albertine made her feel like an invalid, and
she wasn’t one. Not anymore. A strong sun was melting the last of the slush in the
roads, and by tomorrow you wouldn’t be able to tell there’d been a snowstorm. That
was one of the pluses of living in Colorado Springs, she thought, getting out of the
car: It might get cold or snowy for a day or two, but you could always count on the
sun shining before too long. No seasonal affective disorder for folks living in Colorado
Springs.

Two Motrin swallowed with a gulp of Pepsi had dulled the ache in her ass, and she
was able to ignore it as she used a database to find a phone number for Parnell Parkin
in Oklahoma. There was no Parnell listed, but there was a P. Parkin in Enid and another
one in Stillwater. Dialing the first number, Charlie reached a Pamela Parkin and apologized
for disturbing her. A man answered at the other number.

“Parnell Parkin?” Charlie asked.

“Yes. If you’re selling—”

She explained who she was before he could assume she was hawking time-shares and hang
up.

“A private investigator? That’s cool.”

Too young, Charlie thought. Maybe she had the wrong number. As succinctly as possible,
she told him about her search for Heather-Anne’s real identity and the woman’s habit
of marrying men, bilking them of their money, and possibly killing them or trying
to kill them. “I understand that at one point she was married to a Parnell Parkin
of Oklahoma,” Charlie finished. “I don’t suppose that’s you?”

“You want my pop,” the young man said, his voice much cooler. “But you can’t talk
to him. He’s been in a coma for twelve years, ever since the accident.”

Charlie sat up straighter, her spidey senses tingling. “Was he married to someone
like the woman I’ve described?”

“Oh, yeah. Look, can we Skype or something? I’d rather do this face-to-face.”

Charlie had never Skyped, but she didn’t want to miss the opportunity of finally learning
something about the real Heather-Anne before she became Heather-Anne, so she followed
young Parnell’s instructions and soon found herself looking at a college-aged man
with a Justin Bieber haircut sitting in a room plastered with OSU pennants, baseball
trophies, and what looked like newspaper clippings on the walls. An unmade bed sat
under a window through which Charlie could see a backyard and a swing set.

“OSU fan, huh?”

“Starting shortstop,” Parkin said with a strained smile.

Charlie wondered if he lived at home instead of in a dorm because of his dad’s situation.
“Can you tell me how your dad met … what was Heather-Anne calling herself then?”

“Annie Bart. I don’t think she was ‘calling herself’ that. It was her real name. The
Barts lived next door to us for years.”

Finally! Charlie felt a surge of triumph. She had worked her way back to the real
Heather-Anne. “What happened between Annie and your dad?”

“My mom ran off when I was only five and my brother was three. My dad raised us alone.
I saw Annie around—she lived next door, after all—but she was ten years older than
me, and I never took much notice of her until she started coming over to hang out
with my dad on the porch after dinner. I remember thinking she was really pretty,
with blondy-brown hair that hung to her waist, and green eyes that were … well, really
green.”

Charlie thought she could safely assume young Parnell was not working on a degree
in advertising or creative writing.

“She made my dad laugh. I don’t ever remember him laughing so much.” Parnell sounded
wistful.

“Where were her parents during this courtship? Were they happy to see their daughter
hook up with a man so much older?”

“It was just her mom. I don’t remember ever meeting her dad. Folks said her mom …
well, rumor had it that one of the doctors in town bought the house for Annie’s mom
as a … well … Anyway, she’d gone off with some man a few months before Annie started
hanging out with Pop.”

“So they got married.”

Parnell nodded. “I was best man, even though I was only nine.”

“Which would have made Annie about nineteen,” Charlie mused.

“Right. She was nice enough to me and Tim, and we liked her, even though it was hard
to think of her as our stepmom. She just wasn’t mommish, you know? Anyway, you’ve
got to remember I was only ten or eleven, so I’m sure I missed a lot of the ‘relationship
dynamics’”—Parnell put air quotes around the words he’d probably picked up in Intro
to Psychology—“but I think Annie got tired of living with my dad, maybe because he
was so much older, maybe because she’d felt like there was more to life for a woman
as beautiful as she was. By the time he had his accident, she was really beautiful—Megan
Fox beautiful.”

Charlie thought Megan Fox was more trashy than beautiful, but she wasn’t a twentysomething
man. “Can you tell me about your dad’s accident? What happened?”

“No one knows for sure. He was up on a ladder, cleaning out the gutters, and he must
have fallen, because when we came home he was on the ground, unconscious.” Strain
tightened Parnell’s voice. “We called 911, and they came quickly, but the doctor said
he must have hit his head on an exposed root from the old oak tree, because there
was a dent in his skull. Subdural hematoma, bleeding into the brain … He’s never woken
up.”

Parnell turned away to look out the window for a moment, and Charlie thought he was
hiding tears. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I won’t deny it’s been hard,” Parnell said. “Annie didn’t help at all. She was gone
the next morning. Disappeared during the night and just left me and Tim there alone.
We woke up and went looking for her, but she was gone: suitcases, clothes, everything.
We didn’t know what to do, so we fixed ourselves some Lucky Charms and waited. You’ve
got to remember we were only eleven and a half and nine. I guess it was almost noon
before we called my best friend and his folks came to pick us up.”

“What did you do?” Charlie asked, knowing it had no bearing on her investigation,
but caught up in the young boys’ plight.

“Moved in with our aunt and uncle. Mom’s sister and her husband.”

Charlie could relate to that, having lived with her Aunt Pam and Uncle Dennis for
several years while her parents missionaried around the globe. “Was there … was there
any hint that Annie could have been implicated in the accident?”

Parnell shook his head definitively. “No way. She was with us, me and Tim. She had
taken us to the zoo in Oke City for the day. Pop stayed home to do some chores around
the house. He said if you’d seen one giraffe you’d seen them all.” He smiled faintly
at the memory.

Charlie rocked back in her chair.
Well, there goes that theory,
she thought, momentarily stumped. She’d been so sure Annie had engineered Parnell
Senior’s accident. Maybe, she thought slowly, his accident really
was
an accident, but it gave Annie the idea for getting rid of future husbands.

“When she left,” Parnell volunteered, “she cleared out the bank accounts and took
Pop’s car. All we had left was the house. My aunt and uncle moved in here with us
because it was bigger than their place and they didn’t want to take us away from our
home since we’d already lost our mom and pop.”

“They sound like nice people.”

“They are.”

They seemed to have covered everything, but Charlie felt vaguely dissatisfied, like
she was missing something important. She couldn’t come up with a question that would
get at it, so she was on the verge of thanking Parnell and saying good-bye when he
said, “I’d say the only good thing about Annie leaving was that apparently Adam went
with her. At least, he disappeared at the same time. She was nice in her own way,
but he always gave me the creeps.”

Straightening, Charlie leaned forward. “Adam?” She tried to keep her voice neutral
to keep from startling Parnell.

“Annie’s brother.”

Jackpot! Charlie barely refrained from pumping her fist. “Tell me about Adam.”

*   *   *

By the time she said good-bye to Parnell twenty minutes later, she felt like she was
finally on the right track. Adam and Annie, she surmised, better known to her as Heather-Anne
Pawlusik and Alan Brodnax, were a team. They used Heather-Anne’s beauty to trap vulnerable
men and then, when they’d gotten their hands on enough of the men’s money, they—or
more likely Adam—killed them. Or tried to kill them, Charlie thought, thinking of
the alive-but-crippled Wilfred Cheney who swore there’d been another vehicle involved
in his accident. Adam had been driving it, Charlie bet. Adam was a researcher, he’d
said. He probably dug up information on the men, their likes and dislikes, and helped
Annie mold herself into the kind of woman each man would be attracted to. Tansy Eustis
had mentioned that Amanda Two bore some interesting resemblances to Amanda One. Right
down to the name.

Adam, Charlie decided, had sent the newspaper clipping to Les in Costa Rica. Who else
would have known about Eustis’s death and known that Eustis’s widow was in South America
with Les Goldman? Why had he warned Les, though? Had Adam grown a conscience? Was
he worried that his sister would siphon off Les’s money and find a way to drown him
in the ocean surf or feed him to the sharks? Charlie popped open a Pepsi, propped
her feet on her desk with the chair balanced on two legs, and thought. Dusk crept
in the window, but she was barely aware of it. Various bits and pieces of the puzzle
drifted around her brain, glancing off each other, refusing to form a coherent picture.

No! She brought the chair back to the ground with a clang. No, just the opposite.
Adam was afraid that Heather-Anne was getting cold feet about the murders, or that
she was genuinely in love with Les. Charlie found that latter thought almost incomprehensible—how
could the gorgeous Heather-Anne be attracted to dumpy Les Goldman?—but accepted it
for the sake of her theory. Adam feared that Heather-Anne and Les would ride off into
the Costa Rican sunset, enjoying their ill-gotten millions, while he—Adam/Alan—was
left in the Colorado Springs rental house, sans money, sans job, sans sister. Charlie
wondered about the relationship between the brother and sister but decided it didn’t
matter whether they’d fought, or whether Heather-Anne felt threatened by her brother,
or whether she’d simply fallen in love with Les and decided to leave the family business
of seducing, bilking, and killing.

There was little doubt in Charlie’s mind that Adam had killed Annie. Charlie couldn’t
hazard a guess about the siblings’ conversation in the Embassy Suites room, but she
was convinced Adam had lost it, grabbed the nearest weapon—the scarf—and strangled
Heather-Anne to death. Had he been sorry after the fact? It didn’t matter, but Charlie
thought so. At the very least, she thought, he’d have been upset at the loss of his
cash cow, the beautiful bait that attracted the rich men to his snare.

Without trying to work out more of the details, Charlie called Detective Lorrimore
back. She was gone for the day, the officer who answered the phone reported, but he
could transfer Charlie to her voice mail. “Unless it’s an emergency, and then I could
phone her and have her call you back.”

Not quite ready to insist the desk officer connect her with Lorrimore’s cell phone
if the woman was off duty, Charlie asked to be put through to voice mail. She had
no reason to think Adam Bart was likely to make any moves that night; chances were
he’d already left Colorado Springs. With his sister dead, there was nothing for him
in Colorado.

She left a long message for the detective before locking up and deciding to take Albertine
up on her offer of a beer before hitting the road for Gigi’s.

36

Dexter had finished shoveling the driveway and sidewalks by the time I came upstairs
and had, according to Kendall, walked over to his friend Milo’s house to work on a
biology project.